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Book-._^ 



By W. Cunningham, D,D. 

Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Jtrch* 
deacon of Ely 



An Essay on Western Civilization 
In Its Economic Aspects 

Vol. I. Ancient Times 

Vol. II. Mediaeval and Modern Times 

Sold Separately 



ENGLISH INFLUENCE 

ON THE 

UNITED STATES 



BY 



W. CUNNINGHAM, D.D., F.B.A. 

Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Archdeacon of Ely 

formerly Lecturer on Economic History 

in Harvard University 



New York 
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

Cambridge 

UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1916 



.C97 



0/ 



PREFACE 

' I ^HESE essays are on the subjects of addresses 
■*• which I deHvered during October and Novem- 
ber, 1914, in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., in 
Providence, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. 
They were primarily intended to show the close 
connection between English and American life; 
but they also emphasise the fact that from the 
first there have been divergences between English 
institutions, as they were maintained and developed 
in the Old Country, and the similar social elements 
as transplanted and moulded by the environment 
of a New World and the experience it afforded. 
I have drawn at times on architectural evidence, 
the importance of which does not seem to me to 
have been fully appreciated, either as regards the 
precise character or the long continuance of English 
influence. 

As I had many opportunities of conversation 
with American friends on these topics, I feel able 

«3 



vi Preface 

to put forward the opinions here expressed as some- 
thing more than the impressions of a passing visitor ; 
and I venture to hope that these essays may do 
something to explain the EngHshman to the Ameri- 
can, and the American to the EngHshman, and thus 
conduce to the mutual understanding which is the 
basis of a firm friendship. 

W. C. 

Trinity College, 
Cambridge. 

II March, 191 6. 



INTRODUCTION 

IN the two volumes of my Essay on Western Civili- 
sation I tried to mark the special contributions 
which have been made by different peoples in the 
past to the civiUsed life of modern Europe; I did 
not endeavour, however, to enter on any discussion 
of the movement which has been the characteristic 
feature of recent times, or to analyse the diffusion of 
European civiHsation throughout the world. The 
essays which are here collected indicate the lines 
on which we must proceed in order to deal with 
this problem. I have endeavoured to separate one 
particular thread, and to show the ties which have 
connected England with one of the new nations of 
the world — the United States. Many influences 
have been at work — French and Spanish, Teutonic^ 
and Scandinavian; but England, as the Mother 
Country, and the source of ideas of law and govern- 
ment in the United States, may be rightly regarded 
as the main channel by which European civiHsation 
* Roosevelt, History as Literatufe and other Essays, 99, 



viii Introduction 

has reached North America. I have tried to render 
the discussion more precise, by confining myself 
to what is specially English rather than British; 
it is only in the chapter on academic life (Chapter 
IV) that I have touched on anything that is charac- 
teristically Scottish. 

The influence of the English stock and of English 
origin can be traced in every aspect of American 
life, rural and urban, social and political ; but there 
is need for discrimination as to the degree of influence 
exercised in different departments. The connec- 
tion was extraordinarily close at first in regard 
to rural life and the organisation of the township 
(Chapter I). While the city life of America shows 
traces of an English origin, it appears to be almost 
entirely an independent development (Chapters II 
and III). It is interesting, too, to notice how much 
the two countries have shared a common opinion 
as to the limitation of the functions of government 
and the free play of private interests on the one 
hand (Chapter V), and as to the wisdom of holding 
aloof from foreign complications on the other 
(Chapter VI) ; and to see how difference of experi- 
ence, during the last century and a half, has been 
reflected in the attitude towards modern social and 
political problems which the people of each country 
are inclined to take. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface v 

Introduction vii 

I. THE TOWNSHIP. 

(i) The settlement in Britain and in America compared. 

The city and colonisation i 

Cemeteries and burial grounds .... 6 

The settlers and their environment ... 8 

The English village lo 

(ii) The Township in England. 

The meaning of the term 12 

Communal administration 16 

Several pasturage 19 

The revival of the Township . . . . 21 

(iii) The changes in New England. 

Administrative efficiency 24 

Political education 25 

National character . . . . . . 27 

II. TOWN PLANNING. 

(i) Comparison of the growth of English 

and of American Towns. 

The nucleus of an English town ... 29 

The market-place and Civic Patriotism . . 33 

(ii) Building Plots for Private Houses. 

The Crusades 38 

Hippodamus of Miletus 40 

Fourteenth century English suburbs . . . 41 



Contents 



PAGE 



(iii) The Fire of London, 

The occasion for Town Planning ... 44 

The Restoration and the Royal Society . . 45 

Radiating streets 48 

III. PUBLIC BUILDINGS. 

(i) Monuments of Civic Patriotism in England. 

Town halls 51 

Market crosses and houses 54 

The old State House at Boston . . . 56 

(ii) Meeting Houses. 

Halls for preaching 58 

The transaction of Parish Business ... 59 

(iii) Renaissance Architecture. 

Mansion houses 61 

The cupola and dome 63 

(iv) The Stars and Stripes. 

The Washington shield 66 

The East India Company's flag ... 68 

IV. THE COLLEGE COURSE. 

(i) Emmanuel and Harvard, 

Conscious imitation 72 

Puritan training 73 

Yale 75 

(ii) The Scottish Universities. 

Intellectual activity 76 

Civic aims 77 

The formal study of English .... 78 

Professorial teaching 80 



Contents 



XI 



PAGE 



(iii) Princeton and Edinburgh. 

The founding of Princeton .... 83 

Presbyterianism 84 

Scottish influence as personal, rather than official 86 



(iv) 

Parochial libraries 
Dr Thomas Bray 



Public Libraries. 



88 
89 



V. MODERN SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 

(i) Patriarchal and Progressive Societies. 
The organisation of the Manor . 
The Black Death and its consequences 
Negroes and economic freedom . 
The emergence of modern problems . 

(ii) The Elizabethan Realm. 

The realm as a whole .... 

Loyalty to the Crown .... 

The solidarity of interests .... 

Loyalty in the Colonies .... 

(iii) The Nation and its Dependencies. 

The ambition for political power 
The landed interest 
The monied men 
Humanitarian legislation 
The Parting of the Ways . 

(iv) The Industrial Revolution and its 
effects in England. 

The Age of Invention .... 
Clothiers and Farmers .... 
State supervision . . , . • • 
Organised labour 



91 
93 
95 
97 



99 
100 

lOI 

103 



104 

105 
107 
108 
109 



III 
114 
116 
119 



Xll 



Contents 



(v) The awakening of the British conscience. 

Laissez faire 
The State as policeman 
The mechanism of society- 
Neglect of public duty 
Private interests . 
The limitations of American experience 



PAGE 

1 20 

122 
123 

125 
126 
130 



VI. THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF NATIONAL 
POWER AND INFLUENCE. 

(i) The tradition of Insular Policy. 

Isolation from foreign entanglements . . 133 

Superiority at sea 135 

America and internal development . . . 138 

(ii) The claim to arbitrate, 

Dr Woodrow Wilson 139 

Misunderstandings 140 

(iii) The British Empire in the Twentieth Century. 

Economic control discarded . . . .142 
Territorial aggrandisement discarded . . . 143 
A maritime empire .146 

(iv) Imperial Co-operation. 

Attempts at assimilation 149 

The religious sense of responsibility . . . 152 

The problems of Empire 154 

The sense of mission 157 

(v) The Ties of Kinship. 



Racial af&nities . 

National experience 

The neglect of opportunities 

Index 



159 

162 

163 
165 



CHAPTER I 

THE TOWNSHIP* 

(i) The Settlement in Britain and in America 
compared. 

The word Colonisation implies the plantation 
of an organised community, and cannot be properly 
used to describe the migration of individual men 
and women who have no ties to hold them together ; 
this is true both of the ancient and of the modern 
world. The surplus population of Greek cities 
swarmed off, with the design of reproducing their 
own type of civiHsed life on some distant coast. 
The Romans settled colonies of veterans as outposts 
on the frontiers of the Empire, and archaeological 
research brings home to us the pains which they 
took to carry their civilisation with them. This, 
too, was the aim of the English and French settlers 
in North America. The Pilgrim Fathers, and the 

» Harvard Historical Society. 
C. « 



2 The Township [CH. 

founders of other colonies, were not casual immi- 
grants who prepared to take their chances of making 
their way as new comers in a strange land; they 
desired to realise the ideals of life in a civilised com- 
munity which they had framed in the old country. 
Their habits of life had been formed; and they 
did not wish to break with England altogether, 
but to infuse EngHsh institutions with a new spirit 
and make the community more truly Christian. 

The main difference between ancient colonisation 
and the plantation of the New World Hes in the 
fact that the city was the unit of Greek civilisation, 
and colonisation consisted in the planting of cities. 
The necessities of military organisation rendered it 
inevitable that Roman colonisation should have a 
similar character; but the English plantations in 
America aimed on the whole at being self-sufficing 
communities which would raise the necessaries of 
life from their own soil, though they did not forget 
the possibiUty of exporting their products. They 
established themselves in groups which were con- 
venient for defence against possible Indian attacks, 
and for the prosecution of tillage and pasture farming. 
Inevitably they reproduced, in the New World, the 
methods of farming and the organisation of agricul- 
tural labour with which they had been familiar in 
England; though with such modifications as were 



i] Settlement in Britain 3 

rendered necessary by the conditions of a new 
country. England had not yet become either a 
great commercial or industrial nation ; her material 
prosperity was mainly due to her success in the 
cultivation of the land; corn had been one of the 
principal exports of Britain, both in Roman, and 
later in EHzabethan times. Considerable attention 
was given in the early seventeenth century to the 
possibilities of reclaiming waste land and extending 
agriculture within Great Britain, and the founders 
of the American colonies aimed at organising agri- 
culture and land management on English lines in 
the New World. 

There may well be some question, however, as 
to the precise character of the system and methods 
of tillage which they carried with them. At the 
end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century English agriculture was in a state 
of transition; at an earHer period the manorial 
system had been dominant, and this type of organi- 
sation would doubtless have been reproduced, as 
it was in New France. A few generations later 
the collective management of arable land had so 
far broken up in England, that there would have 
been little reason to look for any signs of it in the 
New World ; but at the close of the reign of Eliza- 
beth and under the first two Stuarts, there was an 

I — 2 



4 The Township [ch. 

extraordinary variety of agricultural conditions in 
different parts of England; and it is interesting to 
try to see how closely the various elements, which 
were established in the plantations, were connected 
with prototypes in seventeenth century England. 

In the plantation of the New World, history was 
repeating itself. Some iioo years earlier the Anglo- 
Saxon tribes had migrated from the Continent and 
planted themselves in England. There is an 
interesting parallel between the tribal settlement 
in Britain and the plantation of the Atlantic coast; 
for the ingrained habits of the old stock were once 
more illustrated. New England became a land of 
true nucleated villages, not of the separate hamlets 
which characterise Celtic settlement^. The colonists 
established themselves in agricultural communities, 
according as they were attracted by natural condi- 
tions and the convenience of wood and water^. 
But while there is this broad similarity, there are 
also striking contrasts between the settlement of 
the Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the plantation of 
New England. 

When the Anglo-Saxons planted themselves in 
Britain they found the relics of an ancient civilisa- 

* See Meitzen, Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Germanen, 
especially ii. 119 ff. 

2 Tacitus, Germania, c. 16. 



i] Imperial Civilisation 5 

tion; they entered on the possession of a highly 
cultivated country, which had, till recently, been 
one of the granaries of the Roman Empire; much 
of the land they occupied was doubtless under 
cultivation when the Britons were driven out, and 
there was little to be done in the way of clearing^. 
The Angles and Saxons as they drove the Britons 
back and occupied one district after another, became 
acquainted with fruit trees and cereals which the 
Romans had taught the Britons to cultivate, and 
with breeds of horses, sheep and cattle which had 
been introduced from the Continent. The Anglo- 
Saxons could profit immensely from the material 
vestiges of the arts of life as practised by the Romans, 
but there was a complete break between the Imperial 
political system and the life of the English people as 
it was gradually organised. 

This may be noted both in town and country; 
the Roman roads had been the great arteries of 
communication in the Empire, for commercial as 
well as for military purposes, but the Anglo-Saxons 
had no use for such facilities for travel ; they regarded 

^ The Southern, Midland and Eastern Counties of England 
which were occupied by the Romans for a long period of 
years have had a character impressed on them which differs 
from that of the parts of Britain north of the Ribble and 
the Tees and west of the Dee and the Wye, where there are 
few traces of permanent occupation by the Romans. 



6 The Township [cH. 

the roads as convenient boundaries by which to 
mark the limits beyond which their cattle should 
not stray, but their villages were not built upon 
the roads. The parish map of Cambridgeshire 
illustrates the contrast between rural life under the 
Romans, and after the English occupation. The 
Roman roads, as well as the old British lines of 
fortification, seem to have been useless to the new 
comers for their original purposes; but like the 
river channels, these roads and dykes were made 
to serve as boundaries between one village and 
another, and formed a territorial framework, into 
which their villages were fitted by the settlers. 

The contrast in the habits of life is still more 
striking in the towns, such as London, Lincoln and 
York, where the site of the Roman city has been 
adopted for an English town. Usages in regard to 
the burial of the dead are among the most persistent 
of social habits and the Romans buried their dead 
in cemeteries outside the city like those of the 
catacombs at Rome. When the Roman troops 
were withdrawn and the Britons fell back towards 
the West, the Roman cities must have fallen into 
decay, if they were not wholly deserted ; the English 
were not tempted to occupy them at all at first; 
but as commerce began to develop and centres of 



l] Cemeteries and Burial Grounds 7 

trade sprang up afresh, it became convenient to 
reoccupy portions of the old site. The EngHsh 
carried their own habit of burial into the towns, 
and buried their dead in plots adjoining their houses, 
so that numerous burying grounds were set aside 
within the cities. The difference of habit between 
the English and the Romans in this respect has left 
a deep mark on English life. In the Middle Ages, 
when there was an intense realisation of the unseen 
world, the religious sense demanded that there 
should be places for worship in close connection 
with burial grounds; and all through the rural 
districts, every village burying ground was conse- 
crated, and churches were erected, so that regular 
provision for Christian rites was rendered available 
through the length and breadth of the land. Ecclesi- 
astical Institutions took a territorial character and 
the burying ground in every English village was 
associated with the village church. Modern cities 
are forced to conform to the Roman practice and 
to provide cemeteries outside the town; but it is 
interesting to note that the English habit of burial, 
as contrasted with the Roman, had asserted itself 
in the New World. At Portsmouth in New 
Hampshire, there are several examples of small 
burying grounds, established in the home lots 
within this populous place. Puritanism was shy of 



8 The Toze^nship [CH. 

superstitious observances in regard to the departed, 
and the close association of places for burial with 
facilities for Christian prayer and worship seems to 
have been the exception rather than the rule, at 
least in Massachusetts^. This practice was appro- 
priate to the changed spirit of the time, for a parish 
church and a parish burying ground are found in 
every village in England, but comparatively little 
provision has been made for maintaining Christian 
ordinances throughout large rural areas in New 
England 2; meeting houses were not erected by the 
colonists unless there was a prospect of a considerable 
congregation to hear sermons, and grounds were 
set aside for burial wherever it seemed convenient. 

There was one striking contrast between the 
personnel of the original English settlers in Britain 
and that of the colonists in New England. The 
primitive hero is represented as a handy man who 
might have some acquaintance with land manage- 
ment as well as with seamanship, who could forge 
the sword lie wielded in battle, and was skilled as 

* The depositing of George Whitefield's remains at New- 
buryport, under the pulpit where he last preached, with the 
arrangement for showing his relics, is probably unique. 

2 Governor RoUin of New Hampshire. Proclamation in 
Concord Evening Monitor, 6 April 1899. Quoted by Cunning- 
ham, Christianity and Social Questions, 58. Compare also 
p. 152 below. 



l] Roman Husbandry g 

a bard ; he did his best at everything his hand found 
to do but he could hardly have been said to be an 
expert. Eleven hundred years later when the 
American coast was colonised, the division of 
employments had long been recognised ; those who 
were organising a new plantation endeavoured to 
see that the colonists should be provided with skilled 
artificers of every kind^, and, as clergy, doctors and 
lawyers were joining in the new ventures, men of 
education were available who could be relied upon 
to take a leading part in the management of affairs. 
There were also great differences in the oppor- 
tunities for learning and for improvements which were 
afforded by the changed conditions. It is impossible 
to gauge how much the English were indebted to 
Rome, or what English agriculture in the Middle 
Ages owed to Imperial survivals in Britain, and to 
the introduction of Roman practice through monastic 
influence. Gregory the Great, who sent out the 
first mission to the Angles, was a careful and skilful 
administrator of the great estates of the Roman 
See; and the Benedictine monasteries, which were 
planted in every part of England, maintained a 
type of agricultural organisation that was generally 
pursued throughout the whole country. Each 

1 Advertisement, 1609. Cunningham, Growth of English 
Industry and Commerce, 11. 338. 



lo The Township [cH. 

village was a unit of collective agriculture, where 
the various inhabitants, who had shares of land 
and oxen for ploughing, co-operated together in 
agricultural labour. All had to conform to the 
same system in regard to the management of land 
and the rotation of crops. But though there were 
some valuable products in the New World with 
which the English settlers had been previously 
unacquainted, they had comparatively little to 
learn in regard to the arts of life from their Indian 
neighbours. 

A typical English village in the later Middle 
Ages, with its burying ground and church, consisted 
of a main street along which the houses were ranged. 
Each house facing the street had a yard and garden 
or orchard behind, which constituted the home lot ; 
while there might sometimes be a row or two of 
humbler cottages set end-wise towards the street, 
with little, if any, ground attached to them. The 
arable holdings lay intermixed in common fields 
which stretched beyond the home lots; and each 
husbandman could claim a larger or smaller number 
of the half-acre strips which were not separated by 
any fence, but merely marked out by narrow grass 
baulks. Each husbandman had a share of the hay 
of the meadow; and all pastured their cattle 
together on the common waste, and on such portions 



i] Common Cultivation ii 

of the open fields as were not under crop. The 
settlements which the colonists laid out in the New 
World were similar in many respects to those they 
had left in the Old. Arrangements were made for 
common pasturage on the common; it appears to 
have been quite usual for the settlers in New England 
to use the arable fields for common pasturage after 
the crops were cleared from the ground ; but in one 
respect there was a complete departure from the 
traditional system. The practice of laying out each 
man's holding as a number of separate strips, 
intermixed with the strips of other owners, in an 
arable field was abandoned^; and each man had 
his arable, and sometimes his meadow land in 
severalty 2: the system of common cultivation in 
common fields does not seem to have been introduced 
into the New World. The typical arrangement of 
New England arable land did not correspond at 
all to the typical virgate in Mr Seebohm's map of 
Hitchin^. The arable lands were held in severalty; 

1 On the laying out of land in tiers and granting allotments 
in each tier, compare C. M. Andrews, River Towns of Con- 
necticut, 45 (Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political 
Science, Series vii.). 

2 On difficulties in regard to rights of meadow, see Hudson, 
Lexington, 33. 

^ English Village Community ; this map has been repro- 
duced in Cunningham's Growth of English Industry and 
Commerce, i. 44. 



12 The Township [CH. 

and the normal holding was an oblong strip, with 
a narrow frontage towards the river or the street^. 
It is interesting to note that the methods of farming 
for which provision was thus made in New England 
closely reflect the conditions which were becoming 
current in Elizabethan England 2. Collective culti- 
vation was falling into desuetude, and energetic 
farmers demanded scope for individual manage- 
ment of arable land; but the practice of common 
pasturage was still very generally retained^. 

(ii) The Township in England, 

The settlements which were formed in the New 
World embodied an immense amount of experience 
which had been acquired during the centuries that 
intervened between the invasion of Britain and 
the English colonisation of any part of North 
America: and this holds good, not only of the 

^ The lots at Maiden in 1634 were eight times as long as 
they were broad (Corey, History of Maiden, 61). Compare 
also the map of allotments in Witherfield in C. M. Andrews, 
op. cit. 5. The same general method of arrangement is found 
in Pennsylvania (Browning, Welsh Settlement in Pennsylvania, 
31) and in Canada, W. B. Munro, Seignior al System in Canada 
(Harvard Historical Studies), 80. 

2 See p. 20 below. 

3 Each individual was responsible for fencing his own 
boundaries so as to prevent damage to his neighbour's crops. 
C. W. Alvord, Introduction to Collections of Illinois Historical 
Library, 11. pp. xxii, 139. Reynolds, Pioneer History, 49. 



i] The Township in England 13 

methods of tillage, but of habits of self-government. 
"The Puritans who colonised New England did not," 
as Mr Fiske^ rightly points out, "invent the town 
meeting. They were familiar already with the 
proceedings of the vestry meeting and the manorial 
courts, but they were severed now from church and 
from aristocracy." A close examination is necessary, 
however, in order to show precisely what they 
left behind and what they carried with them to the 
New World. 

Throughout the Middle Ages there were two 
distinct elements in the administration of EngHsh 
rural life, and it is a problem of great difficulty to 
make out in what fashion they were combined at 
any particular place or time 2. There was, on the 
one hand, the manorial or seigneural authority, 
which exercised control over the whole organisation, 
and served as the link through which each village 
discharged its duties and responsibilities towards 
the realm as a whole 3. On the other hand, there 
was an element of communal assent and approval, 
which was none the less real because it is exceedingly 
obscure. There are innumerable records which 
preserve the history of English villages from the 

1 American Political Ideals, 49. 

2 W. J. Ashley, Introduction to translation of Fustel de 
Goulange's The Origin of Property in Land, p. xli. 

3 See below, p. 103. 



14 The Township [ch. 

manorial point of view; but communal manage- 
ment was very generally a matter of custom and 
tradition, and we have to rely for the most part 
on incidental allusions. In the plantation of the 
New World these elements may be said to have 
fallen apart ; in Virginia and the South, the manorial 
system and the organisation of labour by dependents 
were introduced, and a similar system was established 
by the Dutch in New York, and by the French in 
Canada, Louisiana and the valley of the Ohio ; and in 
these areas the communal element fell into the back- 
ground, especially where the planters were dependent 
on slaves or servitors for agricultural labour. In New 
England, on the other hand, the manorial element 
seems to have been quite unimportant, while com- 
munal control became the method by which local 
administration of internal affairs was carried on. 
The township had existed in England from time 
immemorial, but it did not attain its full develop- 
ment until it was transplanted from the old country 
to the New World. 

The term township, which is typical of New 
England, has almost dropped out of use in the 
greater part of England, though it is still familiar 
in the Northern Counties ; we speak more commonly 
of parishes or manors or villages; and it is not 
quite clear whether a township was only another 



l] The Township in England 15 

name for these groups, or whether it had any special 
significance. We can perhaps settle the matter 
most easily by considering the way in which this 
special term is applied. One of the earliest instances 
is in the Rolls of Parliament, where it is applied to 
the village of Chesterton, which was mostly com- 
prised in a royal manor and was a parish (1414)^. 
On the other hand, there were many parishes, 
especially in the North of England, which contained 
a number of townships ; the parish of Kendal 
contained twenty-four "townships or constabularies, 
and fifteen chapelries^"; while the borough of 
Much Wenlock, in Shropshire, consisted of several 
separate townships. Life in an English village had 
various aspects, and it seems that the terms parish 
and manor and township were ordinarily applicable 
to the same social group. When it is viewed in 
its ecclesiastical relations, and with reference to 
episcopal authority, it is termed a parish ; its relation 
to civil authority and the payment of taxation ^ is 
accentuated if it is called a manor, and with respect 
to the communal management of its internal affairs 
it is properly designated a township. The township 



1 Rot. Pari. IV. 603. 

2 Nicholson and Burn, Westmorland, l. 65. 

8 Townships were assessed for the wages of Knights of 
the Shires in 1444. Rot. Pari. v. iii. 



i6 The Township [ch. 

and its officials were concerned with internal police ^ ; 
but it had also important functions to discharge 
during the Middle Ages in the management of the 
cultivation of the Common Fields, and the exercise 
of rights of pasturage on the Common Waste 2. It 
has besides been utilised as a unit for the adminis- 
tration of the Poor Law in some of the Northern 
Counties, since the time of Charles IP. The Borders 
between England and Scotland had been exposed 
to constant raids, and were very sparsely inhabited ; 
after the Union of the Crowns there seemed to be 
a possibility of reducing this turbulent area to order, 
and the centres of cultivation and pasture farming, 
which were formed within the limits of ancient 
ecclesiastical parishes, were rightly spoken of as 
Townships. 

We have a few hints which enable us to guess at 
the methods by which the business of the township 

* H. B. Simpson, The Office of Constable, in English His- 
torical Review, x. 627. 

2 As the unit for agricultural purposes, it has recently 
come into fresh notice. Since 1850, the Enclosure Commis- 
sioners have found it convenient to take the township as the 
unit in terms of which they report on any scheme for the 
enclosure of Commons. Conner, Common Land and Enclosure, 
270. 

' Lancashire, Cheshire, Derby, Northumberland, York- 
shire, Durham, Cumberland and Westmorland. 14 Chas. II, 
c. 12. 



l] The Township in England 17 

was conducted in the county of Durham during 
the fourteenth century. The tenants of Wallsend 
were summoned to a town meeting in 1368^, and 
at Acley in the following year^ a committee of six 
was elected for ordering the affairs of the community. 
These would include the management of the collective 
agriculture of the place, and this was not by any 
means an easy matter. The two branches of land 
management were closely interconnected, though 
distinct areas were allotted to the open fields on 
which a course of tillage was carried on continuously, 
to the meadow land which was used for hay, and 
the waste which was permanent pasturage. The 
course of cultivation on the open fields and the 
quota of work which each man should do were laid 
down by custom, and there would be little oppor- 
tunity for revising them unless the lord of the 
manor consented. But the rights of pasturage on 
the waste, and the management of the stock, must 
frequently have given rise to difficult decisions. 
In many cases it seems that the right to pasture 
on the waste was reserved to those who had strips 
in the open fields, and who could not carry on their 
tillage unless they had the means of pasturing the 

1 Halmota Prioratus Dunelmensis, Surtees Society, Lxxxn. 
(1886), 70. 
a Ibid. 82. 

C. 2 



1 8 The Township [ch. 

oxen which they contributed to the plough teams of 
the village. In other cases each cottager could 
claim a right to put one cow or more upon the 
common waste. It cannot have been an easy matter 
to decide what persons had a common right and to 
settle exactly what kind of stock and what number 
of beasts each commoner was entitled to put out to 
feed^. There were other difficulties, not about the 
rights of commoners, but about the management 
of the stock. It was desirable to have the means 
of separating any sheep or cattle that were diseased 
and to be able to segregate the cattle at special 
times. In one or two cases this communal manage- 
ment of the live stock on the common waste has 
lasted till recent times; it is still maintained at 
Whittlesea in Cambridgeshire; and specimens of 
the orders, which were made in the seventeenth 
century, at Cottenham, have been printed^. The 
good management of the village stock was essential 

1 The Durham Halimote Rolls show that questions were 
raised in the fourteenth century as to whether sufficient 
pasturage was available for the tenantry (p. 12); and as to 
one who had no land being prevented from using the common 
(P- I7)« Questions of meadow (Sec. 23), of closes and separate 
pastures (pp. 24, 40, 54) had to be dealt with, as well as the 
provision which should be made for oxen (p. 62) and for horses 
(pp. 22, 69). It was a complicated business. 

2 Common Rights at Cottenham and Stretham in Cambridge- 
shire in Camden Miscellany, xii. (Camden Society, 3rd series, 
XVIII. 1910). 



i] The Township in England 19 

to village prosperity. In many cases land was 
more valuable for purposes of pasture than for 
tillage; but there is ample reason to believe that 
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries insuffi- 
cient attention was given to this important branch 
of the economy of the township. 



The great agricultural improvement, which was 
being introduced during the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, was the substitution of individual for 
communal management of land. The man who 
succeeded in withdrawing his holding from communal 
control and working at it on his own lines, was able 
to make much more of it, especially if his holding 
was large enough to enable him to bring both tillage 
and the management of stock into his own hands 
and to make them co-operate. The old common 
fields were being exhausted; but when a farmer 
could convert his arable fields into pasture and keep 
his stock upon them, they recuperated after a few 
years^. Fitzherbert goes fully into the advantages 
which accrued when this method of convertible 
husbandry superseded the old cultivation of open 
fields, and the maintenance of stock on common 

^ Simkovitch, Hay and History, in PoUt. Science 
Quarterly (1913). xxviii. 401. 

2 — 2 



20 The Township [ch. 

waste 1. In any township where one or two of the 
more substantial men had succeeded in withdrawing 
their holdings and their stock from communal 
management, they would of course have no interest 
in seeing that good order was maintained on the 
common waste. As early as the fourteenth century 
there were complaints that the election of communal 
officials was falling into disuse 2; and as regulation 
ceased to be effective the privileges of the commoners 
were more and more abused. We hear complaints, 
on the one hand, of rich men who put so many 
cattle on the waste that the common was eaten bare 
and the poor commoners were seriously wronged; 
on the other hand, there is ample evidence that 
undesirables were able to establish themselves as 
squatters on the common waste^. Wherever the 
chief fault may have lain, there seems to be little 
doubt that the old system of managing the pasturage 
had broken down, and that the resources of the 
commons were being shamefully wasted in the 
seventeenth century. Generally speaking the com- 
munal management, not only of the open fields 
but of the village stock, appears to have come to an 

^ Fitzherbert, Serveyinge 1539, in Certain Ancient Tracts , 
1777. 

^ Victoria County History, Durham, li. 223. 

^ Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 
II. 568. 



l] The Township in England 21 

end in most parts of England before the close of 
the eighteenth century and to have been superseded 
by individual management of separate farms. 

There were, however, some exceptional cases; 
in several parts of Cambridgeshire the management 
of the stock, and especially of the great herd of 
milk kine, was by far the most important part of 
the village economy, and the substantial men were 
eager to maintain effective regulation of the common 
rights of pasturage. Here the communal element 
asserted itself more strongly than before. At 
Stretham and Waterbeach the tenants, acting under 
manorial authority, carried on an efficient system 
of regulation; while at Cottenham the commoners 
succeeded in buying out the lords of the manors 
altogether so far as the management of the stock 
was concerned. An agreement was drawn up which 
was confirmed by the Court of Chancery in 1596 
by which the commoners secured that the entire 
management of the stock should be in the hands of 
their own Order-makers, and this system appears 
to have been successfully maintained till 1842. 
In these instances it appears that the township was 
capable of taking a new lease of life so far as village 
economy was concerned and of coming into new 
prominence. It is to be noticed that this revival 



22 The Township [CH. 

of the township took place in connection with that 
branch of husbandrj^, in regard to which there is 
most evidence of collective management in New 
England. 

This revival of the township for agricultural 
purposes was somewhat exceptional; but there 
were other causes at work which gave an increased 
stimulus to local self-government all over the 
country; new duties were put upon the township, 
which began to be known as the civil parish. After 
the Reformation, a revolution took place in ecclesi- 
astical finance ; the lands, which had been set aside 
as an endowment to provide means for the repair 
of the parish church^, had often passed into private 
hands. Necessary church expenses had to be met, 
under the new order, by raising an income in money, 
and church ales^ were a favourite expedient for this 
purpose, though contributions were also obtained 
from the parishioners. Communal parochial organi- 
sation thus came to be charged with the responsibility 
of controlling local ecclesiastical finance; and this 
function is still discharged by the parishioners at 
Easter Vestries. These assemblies were sometimes 
turbulent, and the practice of constituting Select 

1 S. L. Ware, Elizabethan Parish, 6% (Johns Hopkins 
Studies in Historical and Political Science. Series xxvi.). 

2 S. L. Ware, op. cit. 70. 



l] The Township in England 23 

Vestries for the more orderly conduct of business 
was favoured by the Bishops in the early seventeenth 
century*. 

Under the new conditions, too, the resources 
of local government were taxed by the difficulty 
of maintaining order, and repressing crime. The 
great households of the feudal nobility had been 
broken up and monasteries had been dissolved, 
and the progress of agricultural improvement was 
inconsistent with the maintenance of the old 
economic life in many villages. The parish con- 
stables were responsible for dealing with vagrancy, 
and their expenses ultimately fell upon the civil 
parish^; while the civil parish was also responsible 
for the maintenance and employment of the poor^. 
This had ceased to be regarded as a matter of 
religious duty, and as Christian charity; it was 
coming to be a part of the civil administration of 
the realm. In the same way the civil parish became 
responsible for the maintenance of roads, and sur- 
veyors* were appointed to discharge these duties. 
There was also a great deal of internal police for 
which the constable, a civil official of the parish, 

^ S, and B. Webb, English Local Government: the Parish 
and the County, 189, 190. 

2 S. and B. Webb, op. cit. 29. 

3 39 Elizabeth, c. 3. 
* 18 EHzabeth, c 10. 



24 The Township [ch. 

was primarily responsible. And hence it may be 
said that the township, especially in those cases 
where communal management of the stock was 
preserved, had attained to an importance at the 
beginning of the seventeenth century which it had 
never possessed before^. After the English Revolu- 
tion parochial public spirit declined, but it is at 
least noticeable that, at the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century, the communal administration of 
local affairs had attained an importance, which 
was not traditional and which has not been main- 
tained, and that under the name of township it 
was transplanted into New England with a similar 
organisation and similar responsibiHties. 

(iii) The changes in New England, 

The Elizabethan township in England, in so far 
as it had freed itself from manorial control, and was 
charged with a great variety of duties, is practically 
identical with the township as it was planted in New 
England ; but the colonists were able to introduce 
a more efficient system of administration by the 
changes they made in the appointment of officers 
and the terms on which they served. The annual 
town meeting could lay down the general principles 
of management, while details were left to be carried 
« S. L. Ware. op. cit. 64. 



l] Administrative Efficiency 25 

out by competent men who were remunerated for 
the time and trouble they gave to official duties. 
In the English village the responsibilities of the 
constable or the churchwarden were undertaken 
in turn by men who found their only reward in 
winning the respect of their neighbours for the 
manner in which they discharged their duties during 
their term of office. Communal management, with 
constantly changing administrative officers, was long 
maintained as the English habit of local government ; 
and an immense amount of local administrative 
work was done, not by men of leisure, but by busy 
men who made time for it and never expected to 
be remunerated for the days or hours they spent in 
the service of the public. This system, however, 
could not secure the highest degree of efficiency, 
as it was not possible to select the most capable 
man for any post, nor to take full advantage of 
the experience he had acquired during a period of 
office. Public business under this system is neces- 
sarily carried on by men who are amateurs, as it 
is only when he enters upon office that the English- 
man discovers the precise nature of his duties and 
learns by a hurried experience how they may best be 
done. 

Increased efficiency of administration cannot, 



26 The Toiiunship [CH- 

however. be secured without cost, not only in the 
payment of salaries, which can be reckoned in money, 
but in the loss that occurs to the community through 
the diminished opportunities of participating actively 
in public life. The principle has been forcibly stated 
by an American writer^: "When we accepted 
democracy as our form of government,*' he says, 
"we ranked the poHtical education of the individual 
as more important than the expert administration 
of government." But so far as the New England 
township goes, the poHtical education which is 
given to each man who is willing to take office, by 
embracing an opportunity of serving his country, 
has been neglected. Even in modern times in 
England when parish affairs are relatively unim- 
portant because so much is done by the paid official 
of the central government, we can see how educative 
a period of office is, as regards the individual who 
undertakes it ; and we can feel that this must have 
been far more true in Elizabethan times when the 
parish was such an important organ for local govern- 
ment. It is chiefly in ecclesiastical matters that 
the communal activities of the township survive, 
in the Easter Vestry. The churchwarden, who 
undertakes office for a year, knows that he is 
personally responsible to the parishioners who 
* J. J. Chapman, Causes and Consequences , 133. 



l] Experience of public duties 27 

appointed him, and he is anxious to do his routine 
duties so as to merit their approval. In regard to 
any large expenditure, such as substantial repairs 
or the purchase of a heating apparatus or an organ, 
he knows that he will have to defend himself against 
criticism, and he is anxious to form his opinion for 
himself, and to try and judge on the advice which 
may be given him by various men of experience. 
He is not willing to rely on the guidance of any 
individual however skilled, and to follow him 
blindly, for he is an empiricist pure and simple. He 
thus becomes for time to come an excellent critic 
of the manner in which his successors discharge 
duties with which his experience has rendered him 
familiar. 

It is also to be noticed that the man who enters 
on an ofhce for a short period is likely to have 
initiative. He has not got into a rut, or to be 
the creature of routine, as so often happens to 
capable servants; and he will often desire that his 
term of office should be rendered memorable by the 
introduction of a definite improvement which he 
has thought out and carried through. 

The cumulative effects of a cause that is con- 
stantly in operation may be very great, and it is 
not fanciful to suppose that the widely diffused 



28 The Township [cH. i 

political education which has been given by parti- 
cipation in parish politics, has, for good or for evil, 
something to do with English national character; 
it has shaped the desire to be well thought of by 
neighbours. The aim of training children in such 
a way that they shall preserve the standing of the 
family in the community, is not unwholesome. 
Such ambitions are guards against anti-social 
tendencies of every kind; even though they may 
prevent a man from throwing his whole heart and 
soul into his personal success in his career: to be 
willing to serve the public gratuitously for a time 
is a mark of pubHc spirit. 

The effect of this personal education in political 
affairs is also seen in the English dislike of any 
divorce between theory and practice, and in par- 
ticular of the suspicion with which men of theory 
who have no local knowledge are regarded. This 
has had a harmful result in the undue disparagement 
of science, which is so widely current in England, 
but it is interesting testimony as to the strength 
of the Englishman's determination to think for 
himself. 



CHAPTER II 

TOWN PLANNING 1. 

(i) The growth of English and of American towns. 

Nothing strikes the European visitor to America 
as more noticeable than the broad and regular streets 
with which the cities are laid out and the contrast 
must be more remarkable to those habituated to 
New York or Washington who find themselves for 
the first time in London or York. But though the 
city life of America has been developed so rapidly 
and on such an enormous scale, it is by no means an 
independent creation. The older cities themselves 
bear witness to a close connection with England. 
On the one hand we can trace a parallelism between 
the early growth of urban life in England in the 
time of the Danes, and the beginnings of town life 
in America, and on the other we find cities on the 
Atlantic coast which contain relics that have their 
origin in ancient civilisation. There were great 
* Drexel Institute, Philadelphia. 



30 Town Planning [CH. 

cities with magnificent public buildings in Greece, 
and city life played an important part in the Roman 
Empire; it is worth while to try and trace the 
precise links by which the town planning of the 
ancient world was shaped in England, and the 
manner in which it was transmitted from England to 
North America. Rural life in America bears the 
impress of transplantation from rural England, 
and urban life has features which connect it through 
England with the ancient world. 

There are one or two English towns which show 
that they originated on the site which had been 
occupied by a Roman city and in which the main 
outlines have been perpetuated. The normal scheme 
of these cities corresponds with that of the Roman 
camps, such as Ardoch and Birrens, which lie 
north of Hadrian's Wall, in a region which was 
subdued by the Roman forces, but not permanently 
utilised by the Romans for agriculture. These 
camps, which had wooden buildings, are rectangular 
with one main street through the town from the 
middle of each end, crossed at right angles by 
another which ran from side to side. Lincoln and 
Chester, among other English towns, exhibit Roman 
remains which show that cities of this mihtary type 
formerly stood on the ground they occupy. When 
an English town grew on such a site it conformed 



li] Physical Conditions 31 

to the old lines; but it may be doubted whether 
the civic life of the Empire survived as a living 
tradition at any centre in England; and there was 
little occasion for towns to grow up, till the revival 
of commerce which took place under the Danish 
influence, and the better organisation of home 
defence which was called for by their invasions. 
There is ample evidence of a reappearance of town 
life in England in Danish times, partly at centres 
which the Romans had found convenient, and 
partly round new centres of population. The 
physical conditions which had rendered London and 
York important places in Roman times, led to 
their resuscitation as soon as trade began to reappear ; 
and the Benedictine monasteries, which had been 
founded in so many parts of the country, became 
considerable centres of trade. The erection of their 
buildings and furnishing of their churches, required 
organisation of industry on a considerable scale, 
and the importation of materials and wares from 
abroad. As places where hospitality could be found, 
they were frequented by travellers, and the monks 
took the opportunity of organising and directing 
the work of others rather than of being dependent 
for sustenance on their own manual labours^. 

^ Cunningham, Organisation of the Masons' Craft in England 
in Proceedings of the British Academy, vi. 



32 Town Planning [CH. 

Glastonbury, Bury and Peterborough were all towns 
which consisted of an Abbey and its dependents. 

There were also towns which grew round a castle 
held by the King, or some great Thane, and occupied 
by his dependents. Of this class are the Midland 
Boroughs, which were built by Edward the Elder 
and the Lady of Mercia; and many similar towns 
began to grow up during the Norman and Angevin 
Period, when so many new castles were erected. 
There were of course cases such as Carlisle, and 
Norwich, where an abbey and castle were contiguous, 
and where the monastic and military elements, taking 
advantage of the relics of Roman roads and Roman 
cities, co-operated in the growth of an English town. 

These elements, which were so influential in 
connection with the beginnings of town Hfe in 
England, may be said to have been entirely wanting 
in the New World. There were neither Roman 
remains nor monastic requirements to be taken 
into account; but yet the beginnings of town life 
in England before the Conquest were to some 
extent parallel with the origin of towns, many 
centuries later, in America. Neither in England 
(apart from the Roman sites) nor in America at 
first, was there any planning of towns on a recognised 
scheme. Each populous centre grew according to 
the convenience of the situation and the require- 



Ii] Growth of Towns 33 

ments of the inhabitants. Both in England and in 
New England, there were towns which depended 
chiefly on the fishing industry, and in which the 
inhabitants found that access to the shore was 
a matter of importance. Both in England and 
in New England, there were towns which were 
primarily dependent on agriculture, and where 
access to the common and to the fields was the 
first consideration. There are not a few EngHsh 
towns at the present day of which the very irre- 
gularity testifies to the conditions to which they 
owe their origin; this is most obvious in seaside 
towns; but in an inland town like Norwich, the 
curve of the main street is a constant reminder of 
the fact that the castle was a chief element in the 
growth of the city, and that the houses of dependents 
clustered round its base. There is doubtless similar 
evidence, in the older parts of New York and Boston, 
which testifies to their origin and the source of 
their prosperity. 

While there are these similarities, in the beginning 
and growth of towns in England and in America, 
there is one striking and significant contrast. The 
principal feature in the plan of an English town was 
the market-place, to which supplies were regularly 
brought and in which the industrial population 

c. 3 



34 Town Planning [ch. 

procured food and materials, and disposed of their 
wares. English towns were commercial in their 
origin; for the castle or abbey, where population 
clustered, was a centre of a local demand for butter, 
eggs and other rural produce ; and as the industrial 
side of town life became more developed, there was 
a demand for corn which could not be supplied 
from the town fields. But the inhabitants of New 
England towns were, for the most part, independent, 
so far as their habitual requirements were concerned, 
and there was no need for a weekly market at first. 
The trade which called American towns into being 
was occasional, when a ship arrived and opportuni- 
ties offered of buying foreign goods or sending 
commodities abroad. The trade of an American 
town was analogous to that of a mediaeval^ fair 
rather than to that of an English market town. 
The market-place was of increasing importance 
throughout the Middle Ages; and the great ex- 
tensions of English towns, which took place in 
connection with the Crusades, are characterised 
by large open market-places^. 

1 Cunningham, Christianity and Economic Science, 46. 

2 Many of these areas have been blocked up by subsequent 
encroachments. Those who had temporary stalls obtained 
leave to replace them with permanent wooden buildings. 
This has occurred very generally in regard to the shambles 
or butchers' shops. In some cases the wooden rows which 
replaced the movable stalls have given place to permanent 



II] Market Places 35 

During the Middle Ages the market of a town 
was not merely a place where individuals met to 
drive their own bargains and have a deal ; it was a 
public institution for regulating the trade of the 
town in the interests of its prosperity as a community. 
The market cross was in itself a symbol of authority ^ 
to enforce just dealing, and it was important that 
the use of standard weights and measures should 
be prescribed and enforced. There was provision 
for the official weighing of goods ; and the custody 
of the public beam was sometimes associated with 
the levying of customs, — the weigh-house was also 
a toll booth. This official supervision was of advan- 
tage in guarding against fraud and facilitating 
transactions between man and man, but there was 
also much market regulation which was intended to 
give effect to a definite civic policy, and to lay down 
rules which should not only guarantee honest 
deahng, but should also make directly for the 
welfare and the prosperity of the town as a whole. 

stone buildings and narrow rows of shops, which are divided 
by Httle alleys. These encroachments are particularly 
noticeable at Ludlow, in Shropshire, but there are many 
towns where the booths that have clustered round the 
Town Hall detract from the dignity and spaciousness of the 
original market-place. 

1 This is specially noticeable in Scotland. On the con- 
nection of Scottish Market Crosses with the Perron at Lidge 
see Scottish Historical Review, xiii. 174. 

3~'2 



36 Town Planning [CH. 

The townsmen believed that they were better 

served when there were opportunities of bargaining 

in one definite place; and they could look round 

from stall to stall and compare various offers ; supply 

and demand adjusted themselves more publicly and 

therefore more fairly. They were suspicious of 

the forestallers who bought up goods before they 

were exposed in the market-place, and of the 

regrator who made speculative purchases with the 

view of selling at some future time, or in some 

other place. They were anxious that the man who 

wanted to use the products of the neighbourhood, 

or the fish that was landed at his own door, should 

have a preference in purchasing as compared with 

those who lived in distant places. The Elizabethan 

regulations for markets show a special care for the 

wants of the poor consumer ; and those who bought 

in small quantities, whether corn for food, or wool 

as a material for their industry, were enabled to 

enjoy the pick of the market. The care which was 

taken of the consumers as a body was also exercised 

as municipal life developed, and the English towns 

became centres of industry or foreign trade. The 

spirit of civic patriotism was strong, and every 

effort was made that the prosperity of the town as a 

whole and its reputation and success should be 

borne in mind, and that private convenience should 



n] Market Regulation 37 

be habitually ignored where public interests were 
concerned. The whole trading life of every English 
town was dominated by constant reminders of the 
duty of regulating business transactions so that 
private gain might be subordinated to the good of 
the community; and a basis was thus laid, which 
rendered it comparatively easy to induce traders to 
take account of larger considerations of national 
policy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
and to introduce humanitarian legislation in the 
nineteenth. The prominence of the market-place 
in every EngHsh town is a testimony to the import- 
ance of the market as an institution ; New England 
towns do not afford similar evidence of the market- 
place as a salient feature in the beginning or the 
growth of the town. The market-place, on which 
Faneuil Hall and the Quincey market stand, was 
not part of the original site of Boston, but was 
reclaimed from the shore. As late as 1734 the 
inhabitants dishked having to "resort to localities 
and preferred to be served at their houses in the 
old way^". Where such habits existed there was 
little room for frequenting the market as an 
institution, and Httle attempt could be made to 
enforce a civic policy in the public interest. The 
freedom of the individual to carry out a deal in the 
* S. H. Drake, Old Landmarks of Boston, 133. 



38 Town Planning [ch. 

way which suited his own convenience and without 
reference to other considerations obtained full 
scope, and the belief that this is beneficial for the 
community itself, has come to be regarded as 
axiomatic in America to a much larger extent than 
has ever been true in England^. The keenness of 
the American business-man is the natural outcome 
of freedom for private dealing which has characterised 
American towns from their beginnings. 

(ii) Building Plots for Private Houses. 

There was no conscious influence from the ancient 
world in the growth of English towns before the 
Norman Conquest, but an entirely new era opened 
during the Period of the Crusades. These great 
expeditions brought about an immense development 
of commercial activity; there was much business 
to be done in connection with the equipment and 
transport of troops, and Italian cities like Venice 
and Genoa entered into a keen rivalry for securing 
the main share in this business; the movement 
not only gave a temporary stimulus but had per- 
manent effects as well. The peoples of the West 

1 There was less enforcement of civic policy in Scottish 
than in EngHsh market towns, and freedom for individual 
trading had more scope to the North than to the South of 
the Tweed. 



n] Plots for Private Houses 39 

were brought into direct contact with the Levant 
and the countries round it ; they had access to the 
wares and products which were suppUed from the 
East, and they also came into contact with the 
great heritage of civiHsed Hfe which survived in 
the Byzantine Empire. The barbarian invaders 
had devastated the West, but Constantinople had 
escaped their attacks, and the arts of life, as they 
had developed in Greek cities, and the organisation 
which characterised the Roman Empire, were 
preserved as a living thing to impress the minds of 
Norman and Prankish Crusaders and to excite them 
to imitation. 

This imitation is very obvious in regard to 
military affairs; the science of fortification, as 
understood in the ancient world, was illustrated 
in the defence of Constantinople; and came to be 
applied in the great strongholds which were erected 
in Normandy and on the Borders of Wales. But 
a permanent mark was left on the arts of peace, 
no less than on those of war. The stimulus that 
was given to commerce, and the perception on the 
part of English Kings of the advantage they might 
derive from developing commerce, brought about 
the foundation of many new towns, both in Britain 
and on the Continent ; and led to the rapid expan- 
sion of many existing towns by the addition of large 



40 Town Planning [CH. 

suburbs. Edward I founded villef ranches in Gascony 
as well as in England ; and other potentates followed 
his example. In these new towns and suburbs it 
is easy to discern a deliberate plan, and the conscious 
adoption of definite schemes of arrangement. The 
most perfect existing examples are at Montpazier 
and Carcassonne. But in other towns, which were 
founded or extended at this period, it is easy to 
recognise that the surveyor had a definite scheme 
in mind, even though he did not follow it pedantic- 
ally, but adapted it to the peculiarities of site or 
other local conditions. It is plain that during this 
period there was a revival of the art of town planning, 
as it had been practised in the ancient world and 
in cities with which the Crusaders had become 
familiar. 

Long centuries before, when Alexander the Great 
established Greek dominance over the Eastern Medi- 
terranean, a great many new cities were founded; 
his chief adviser, in laying out roads in Antioch, 
Alexandria and other places, had been Hippodamus 
of Miletus; and the special feature which differen- 
tiated his work from that of earlier surveyors was 
the completeness with which his plans were thought 
out. Not only did he arrange for the grouping of 
the public buildings, but he laid down a regular 



II] Plots for Private Houses 41 

scheme for the whole town with measured spaces for 
all the private houses ; this was also a characteristic 
feature of the towns which were founded in Western 
Europe during the Crusading Period^. Montpazier 
is an excellent illustration of one type; it was 
rectangular but differed in many ways from the 
scheme which is preserved in the Roman camp, 
there are three main avenues running lengthwise 
and four cross streets which divide the city into 
twenty blocks. One of these blocks was left for the 
market-place, and one was occupied by the church, 
but the rest were laid out in lots on which private 
houses could be built 2. Modification of the same 
scheme is recognisable in St Andrews which was 
founded by the Bishop in the thirteenth century 
by inducing a colony from Berwick to settle there 3. 
There is also evidence of a definite plan in Salisbury 
which was bodily removed from its ancient site by 
Bishop Poore in the early part of the thirteenth 
century; while Winchelsea was built on similar 
lines by Edward I. 

Great expansions of existing towns occurred in 
the Eastern Counties, which were such a flourishing 

* Cunningham, The corrupt following of Hippodamus of 
Miletus at Cambridge, in Cambridge Antiquarian Society 
Transactions, N.S. iii. 

2 J. H. Parker, Domestic Architecture, II. 144. 

8 Scott, Berwick, 6. 



42 Town Planning [ch. 

part of England at that period ; and are noticeable 
in Bury and Norwich as well as at Peterborough 
and Cambridge. These town expansions have very 
extended market-places; but their characteristic 
feature is the regularity with which the lots for 
private houses and shops are laid out. The houses 
usually stood with their gables towards the street; 
inns and larger buildings were double houses which 
contained an interior court-yard; many of these 
remain unchanged to the present day^. The single 
houses were also provided with means of access to 
the workshop or yard which lay behind each house. 
Beside the door from the street into the house 
itself there was an alley which communicated with 
the premises behind; and this type of house may 
be said to have become universal in English towns 
during the later Middle Ages, and to have held its 
own until the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries^ ; 
this was the ordinary arrangement of shops and 
dwelHng places in an EngUsh town, at the time 
when the plantation of the Atlantic coast was being 

* The frontage of the Angel at Grantham is striking 
though the house itself has been renovated. The Red Lion 
of Banbury is a good example of a type that is fast dis- 
appearing. 

2 In many cases, as in Boston in Lincolnshire, or with 
the rows in Yarmouth or the closes in Edinburgh, these 
alleys were public thoroughfares between two houses, and not 
private passages. 



Ii] Plots for Private Houses 43 

carried on rapidly. In more recent times provision 
has been made for access to the yard behind a house 
by back streets and mews lanes ; and there has been 
no need to provide an additional entrance from 
the front. When the new town of Edinburgh was 
founded it was possible to dispense with the narrow 
passages which were so characteristic of the older 
parts of the city. 

CarefulljT' measured plots were laid out for private 
dwelling houses in American towns, as they became 
more populous, and the streets must have been very 
similar in appearance to those of the seventeenth 
century EngHsh towns. In 1795 there were in 
Boston, in Massachusetts, ranges of wooden buildings 
all situated with one end towards the street^, and 
the alley at the side of the houses was a common 
feature; it has not even yet entirely disappeared 
from the older parts of New York 2 or Philadelphia 
or Boston, though it has long since ceased to be 
convenient for the ordinary conditions of town life. 
This feature may certainly be regarded as a relic 
of the method of laying out private houses which 
existed in ancient times, and which has been 



* S. H. Drake, Old Landmarks of Boston, ix. 252. 

2 A similar method of laying out plots for private houses 
had been adopted in the Low Countries, and may have been 
transmitted from Holland to New Amsterdam. 



44 Town Planning [CH. 

transmitted to the New World in the form in which 
it was adopted and perpetuated in England. 

(iii) The Fire of London, 

During the later Middle Ages there was Uttle 

occasion for the exercise of the art of town planning 

in England. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries 

were a time of civic decay. There are indeed not a 

few beautiful buildings which were erected by the 

members of the oligarchies who were coming to 

control the trade and the government of the towns^ ; 

but there was little demand for the laying out of 

new quarters. Enterprising artisans were inclined 

to steal away from the corporate towns to villages 

where they had greater freedom to pursue their 

crafts; the migration might sometimes lead to the 

plantation of an industrial hamlet, like Broadway 

in Worcestershire; but there was no occasion to 

give attention to the laying out of urban areas. 

Even though the trade and wealth of London were 

growing at the expense of provincial towns, and 

some of the gardens and open spaces within the 

city were being built over, no encouragement was 

given for the extension of suburbs. Indeed the 

wealth and poHtical power of the city were so great 

1 For example the Guild Hall at York and St Mary's Hall 
at Coventry. 



ii] The Fire of London 45 

that James I and Charles I had reason to regard 
this civic community as a dangerous rival and took 
steps to discourage its expansion. Hence there 
was little opportunity for applying the knowledge 
of ancient architecture, which had been opened up 
by the Renaissance, to civic purposes in England, 
until the clearing of a large part of the area of 
London by the Fire of 1666 rendered it necessary 
to set about the rebuilding of the capital of the 
country. Owing to the eagerness of the population 
to rebuild their houses and resume their businesses 
as soon as possible, the opportunity of reconstructing 
London on entirely new lines was lost^. But none 
the less the efforts which were made by national 
and municipal authorities rendered the time of the 
Fire an important era in the history of town planning 
in England. 

Those who regard the history of England from 
a purely miUtary standpoint are inclined to contrast 
the greatness of Cromwell, supported by a well 
discipHned army and possessing an excellent fleet, 
with the decadence of the Monarchy under Charles 
II ,* but when account is taken of the arts of peace 
we see what an extraordinary development of 

* W. Besant, London in the Time of the Stuarts, 269, 



46 Town Planning [ch. 

national life characterised the latter half of the 
seventeenth century. There was a revival of 
domestic industry and foreign commerce; and the 
foundations of the English Empire both in the East 
and the West were secured by the acquisition of 
Bombay and New York. There was also a remark- 
able movement for bringing science to bear on the 
development of national resources. The founders 
of the Royal Society were not only eager investi- 
gators but pubhc-spirited men ; a body of intelligent 
opinion had been organised and could be directed 
towards the solution of the problem of the rebuilding 
of London in such a fashion that the danger 
of the recurrence of a similar disaster should be 
minimised. 

*'Some intelligent Persons," as the biographer 
of Wren records, "went farther, and thought it 
highly requisite, the City in the Restoration should 
rise with that Beauty, by the Straightness and 
Regularity of Buildings, and Convenience for Com- 
merce, by the well disposing of Streets and publick 
Places, and the Opening of Wharfs, &c. which the 
excellent Situation, Wealth and Grandeur of the 
Metropolis of England did justly deserve; in respect 
also of the Rank she bore with all other trading 
Cities of the World, of which tho* she was before 
one of the richest in Estate and Dowry, yet unques- 



ii] The Fire of London 47 

tionably the least beautiful. Informe, ingens, cui 
lumen ademptum, 

"In order therefore to a proper Reformation, 
Dr. Wren (pursuant to the royal Commands) imme- 
diately after the Fire, took an exact Survey of the 
whole Area and Confines of the Burnings having 
traced over, with great Trouble and Hazard, the 
great Plain of Ashes and Ruins; and designed a 
Plan or Model of a new City, in which the Deformity 
and Inconveniencies of the old Town were remedied, 
by the inlarging the Streets and Lanes, and carrying 
them as near parallel to one another as might be; 
avoiding, if compatible with greater Conveniences, 
all acute Angles; by seating all the parochial 
Churches conspicuous and insular; by forming the 
most pubHck Places into large Piazza's, the Centers 
of eight Ways; by uniting the Halls of the twelve 
chief Companies, into one regular Square annexed 
to Guild-hall; by making a commodious Key on 
the whole Bank of the River, from Blackfriars to 
the Tower'^." 

Wren was not alone in this matter, however, 
and the fact that a plan survives, which is somewhat 
similar in general character and which was drawn 
by Sir John Evelyn, shows that there was a great 

1 Wren, Parentalia, No. lil. Sect. ii. pp. 267, 268. 



48 Town Planning [cH. 

deal of interest in town planning. The topic was 
so much in the air that William Penn, who returned 
to London in 1667, could hardly escape its influence ; 
and when he was able to take an active part in 
colonial enterprise it is not surprising to find that 
he made a careful plan for the city which was to 
be founded in Pennsylvania. In 1683 he pubHshed 
an account of the city of Philadelphia which shows 
a design of rectangular streets with regular blocks, 
and closely resembles the scheme which was adopted 
when Philadelphia was eventually laid out. The 
founding of Philadelphia appears to be a turning 
point in the history of the development of towns 
in the United States ; till that time they had grown, 
but from that time onwards the desirability of 
having a regular scheme has been fully recognised, 
and the personaHty of Penn seems to link this 
important advance in the development of American 
cities with the revived interest in town planning 
which had arisen in connection with the recon- 
struction of London after the Great Fire. 

An interesting feature, both in Wren's and 
Evelyn's plans, had found no place in Montpazier 
and the other crusading towns; the inclusion of a 
scheme for radiating streets was a new departure. 
Wren had planned that there should be radiating 



ii] The Fire of London 49 

streets from the Piazza in which the Exchange 
was to stand; he intended to have another Piazza 
about the middle of Fleet Street, which was to be 
the centre of eight ways, and these were to open up 
convenient thoroughfares and striking vistas. This 
radiating plan appears to characterise the Renais- 
sance as distinguished from the Mediaeval Period ; it 
has a partial application in the streets which radiate 
from the Piazza del Popolo at Rome; it seems, 
however, to have been first adopted completely 
and carried out systematically in the fortified city 
of Palma Nuovo, which was founded by the Venetians 
in 1594 to be a bulwark against invasion either 
by the Austrians or other enemies^. Dr Edward 
Browne^ who visited Palma Nuovo in the latter 
part of the seventeenth century describes it thus — 
"In the centre of the city is fixed a standard over 
a Triple Well, in the midst of a sexangular Piazza, 
from whence a man may see the three gates and 
six streets quite through the town. The Piazza is 
beautified with the front of the Domo church, divers 
statues and an obelisk much gilded.... This is at 
present esteemed one of the noblest fortifications 
in Europe begun by the Venetians 1594, and is a 

1 J. Bleau, Nouveau Theatre d'ltalie (1724), Plan xxxviii. 

2 Brief Account of some travels in divers parts of Europe 
(1685). 84. 



50 Town Planning [ch. ii 

notable bulwark of their State and Italy, for this 
way the Huns and barbarous nations passed into 
Italy." 

The radiating plan appears thus to have been 
invented with a view to the practical convenience 
for defence, and the same general design was adopted 
at Charleroi in 1666. It is rare in the Old World, 
and the most magnificent example of it is found 
in the streets which radiate from the Capitol at 
Washington, but it was not a wholly new creation 
there. Wren had recognised its suitability for the 
purposes of civic life and it came to be an important 
element in his design for rebuilding London. It 
seems not impossible that the radiating plan, which 
was adopted for Annapolis^ and which gives a 
unique character to the city of Washington, may 
have reached America through the tradition of 
Wren's work rather than through any other channel. 

^ The influence of Wren on the plan of Annapolis, and 
on the design of the State House there, is discussed by- 
Mr Frank B. Mayer in his Handbook of Annapolis, 1888 
(Anne Arundel Historical Society). 



CHAPTER III 

PUBLIC BUILDINGS! 

(i) Monuments of Civic Patriotism 
in England. 

Owing to the increase of national consciousness 
and imperialist sentiment, civic patriotism is com- 
paratively unimportant in modern England, but the 
monuments which remain testify to the strength of 
this feeling in mediaeval times and during the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. An extraordinary num- 
ber of beautiful buildings were erected for municipal 
purposes of different kinds during the Middle Ages; 
and many of them still remain to help us to realise 
what a variety of duties were undertaken by public 
authority, and how as time passed and towns grew 
in importance there was necessarily a differentiation 
of function and a change in the character of pubUc 

1 Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. 

4—2 



52 Public Buildings [CH. 

edifices. There are English towns in which one 
building served for all the requirements of municipal 
and commercial life; while there are other places 
where special structures were reared for the purposes 
of trade, and these had nothing to do with the 
administration of justice or the maintenance of 
order. 

The Guild Hall of Much Wenlock still suffices for 
public requirements of many kinds: it has a long 
history, as the stone work and some of the wood 
work probably date from the fifteenth or the latter 
part of the fourteenth century, though a large part 
of the present building was reconstructed in 1577. 
It comprises a market hall and a prison, the Court 
House and a Mayor's parlour; it provides, in one 
picturesque wooden building, accommodation for 
everything that is needed for the hfe of the town. 
On the level of the street there is an open arcade, 
where the market is held; and women, who bring 
in baskets of eggs or poultry for sale, can sit with 
some shelter from the weather. There is a small 
prison built of massive stone at one end of the 
arcade, and one of the wooden uprights has been 
used as a whipping post. The Court House is 
entered by a flight of steps at the opposite end of 
the building from the prison; it is a beautifully 
furnished room, with an entrance into the Mayor's 



Ill] Monuments of Civic Patriotism 53 

parlour which stands above the prison^. This public 

building, which subserved so many purposes, seems 

to represent the primitive Guild Hall or Town Hall^ ; 

and when we remember how much English municipal 

life was affected by continental influence it is not 

surprising there are analogies which suggest that 

this type of public building was not a native creation. 

Colonnaded market-places had been a familiar feature 

throughout the Roman Empire, but there is no 

reason to believe that any of them had survived 

in Britain. The suggestion of this type of building 

probably came from some part of the Empire where 

city life had not been interrupted^. It would be 

natural enough that, when towns were being laid 

out in accordance with a recognised scheme of town 

planning, public buildings should also be copied on 

English soil. 

* The court-room contains an instrument of punishment 
which has fallen into desuetude, the stocks : the set at Much 
Wenlock are of an unusual type as they are set on wheels 
so that the delinquent could be dragged round the town. 

2 The Town Hall built at Bridgnorth, in 1650, was apparently 
intended to serve both for the magistrates and for market 
purposes. So too the Guild Hall at Bath (1625). The open 
loggia was a favourite feature with Inigo Jones and other 
seventeenth century architects. 

3 The ground-plan of the Much Wenlock Town Hall is very 
similar indeed to that of the Palace of the Podesta at Orvieto, 
a beautiful stone building which was erected in the twelfth 
century. Verdier et Cattois, Architecture civile et domestique 
au moyen dge, i. 57. 



54 Public Buildings [CH. 

Before the seventeenth century, the differentia- 
tion of function had gone a considerable way and 
separate buildings were provided for different civic 
purposes. It is very common to find the Court- 
house, with the prison beneath, as a building by 
itself ; while other provision was made for the holding 
of the market. There is an excellent example at 
Winchelsea in Sussex of a Court House with the 
prison beneath, as well as at Totnes in Devonshire 
and Great Yarmouth. In many cases, however, 
other provision was made for the safety of the 
prisoners and they might be confined in a gate- 
house, like that which formerly stood on Bedford 
Bridge and was associated with the name of John 
Bunyan: the civic institutions for enforcing law 
and order were generally housed apart from the 
market shelter with which they had been so closely 
associated at Much Wenlock. 

The importance of civic patriotism in super- 
vising and controlling commercial transactions 
within the town had been shown in the laying out 
of market-places, and it is still further exemplified 
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the 
elaboration of the buildings which were provided 
in connection with markets. The market cross was 
the centre round which the trade of the town was 
conducted, and it also was a position from which 



Ill] Monuments of Civic Patriotism 55 

public announcements and proclamations were read. 
The Carlisle cross (1682), though ornamented, 
retains the character of a shaft standing on steps; 
but in other places the cross expanded so as to 
provide a shelter for the butter-women and their 
wares. At Mildenhall in Suffolk, there is a wooden 
penthouse round the cross, while similar structures 
at Shepton Mallet and at Cheddar are built of stone. 
Stone shelters were occasionally elaborated into 
beautiful crosses of which examples may be seen at 
Salisbury (1365) and Chichester (1500). In some 
cases, it was found convenient to make a room above 
the shelter; to this access could be obtained by a 
spiral staircase, or else by a ladder^. Wooden 
buildings of this type appear to have been not uncom- 
mon in former days^, and one of them remains at 
Wymondham in Norfolk 3. The old stone cross at 
York was raised on five steps; and a penthouse, 

1 The cross at North Walsham, which dates from the 
time of Edward VI, has an upper storey which is only accessible 
by ladder. 

2 These crosses have been replaced by buildings in stone or 
brick at Barnard Castle, and at Burwell, Lines. 

8 The cross at Dunster has dormer windows in the roof 
of the shelter, but there is no attic chamber. This cross was 
frequented by women who sold yarn to travelling merchants. 
The wooden building at Ledbury dates from the end of the 
fifteenth century; it has an open loggia below; and the 
upper storey, which could only be entered by means of a 
ladder, was used as a wool store. The present spiral stair- 
case was added in i860. 



56 Public Buildings [ch. 

restiog on eight wooden pillars, had been erected 
round it : this was removed, however, and a market 
house with a loggia below and a hall above was 
built in 1705^. About the same time, what must 
apparently have been the most remarkable of all 
the EngUsh market crosses, was built at Wakefield. 
The upper storey contained a large room with a 
cupola, and was lighted by a lantern; it stood on 
eight Doric columns and was entered by a spiral 
staircase, while the loggia below served as a market 
shelter^. Other market houses, however, were 
erected quite independently of the market cross. 
The spacious market house at Shrewsbury (1596) 
provided for a corn market in the open space below, 
and the cloth market was held in the hall above^. 

The Pilgrim Fathers were familiar with the civic 
patriotism of Englishmen in the seventeenth century 
and with the beautiful buildings which were being 
erected at public expense or by the munificence of 
private citizens* for civic institutions ; but they had 

* Drake, Ehoracum, 324. ^ Allen, County of York, in. 278. 

* T. Phillips. Shrewsbury (1779), 133, 134. The old 
Buttercross was removed in 1705; and a large stone arcade 
was built on its site. A reservoir in connection with the water 
supply was subsequently constructed as an upper storey. 

* The Town Hall at Rothwell was built by Sir T. Tresham. 
The inscription on the fragments of the market cross at Ipswich 
shows that the executors of Benjamin Osbourne who intended 
to leave ;^50 for the restoration of the cross could only pay ;^44. 



Ill] Monuments of Civic Patriotism 57 

little opportunity to transplant this habit of mind 
to their new homes; similar sentiment was a later 
development in America. There were few if any 
markets and there was little occasion for market 
crosses or market shelters or market houses^. It 
was hardly to be expected that any building of the 
type of Shrewsbury market house should be erected 
in the New World, and it is remarkable that the 
building in Boston which was intended for quite 
different purposes should have a similar character. 
The old State House, which was built in 1748 as a 
Government Office for conducting the business of 
the Province, is curiously similar, both in its position 
and arrangement, to an English market house. 
There is, indeed, no loggia that could be used as a 
market shelter, but the spiral staircase and the 
lantern are features which recall an English market 
house. In erecting a building for the government 
of the province, the authorities fell back on a model 
which had been gradually developed from a market 
cross. As it stands it is unique, and it has an 
added interest when we recognise the stages in the 
evolution of the type it represents. 

1 It is said that there is a market house at Shepperton 
in Virginia. There was at one time a clerk of the market at 
Maiden, Mass. (Corey, History of Maiden, 353). 



58 Public Buildings [CH. 

(ii) Meeting Houses. 

The public buildings in New England in the 
early colonial days were adapted to the requirements 
of rural communities, rather than modelled on 
civic buildings in England. The principal public 
building in a New England town was the Meeting 
House, which was available for town assemblies, 
either for religious or secular purposes. The town 
church, as it appears in New England, had very 
little resemblance to the parish churches which 
remain as monuments of the devotion and art of 
the Middle Ages. But many steps of the transition 
to churches of a different character had already 
been taken in England itself. Perpendicular churches 
are very spacious, with windows which were designed 
for the display of magnificent stained glass, and 
lent themselves readily to be adapted to preaching 
houses. A good example of the seventeenth century 
conception of a dignified church is to be seen at 
Derryi. jjig Q^^y q{ London was responsible for 
carrying out this scheme of plantation handsomely ; 
the Cathedral which was added to the thirteenth 
century tower was built in 1628 ; the peal of bells 
was presented by Charles I at the request of Arch- 
bishop Laud. This noble building has neither aisles 

* Samson, Derry, 199. 



Ill] Meeting Houses 59 

nor transepts, but forms a fine hall capable of 
containing a large congregation. Preaching had 
come to have a great importance as an element in 
public worship ; and no seventeenth century church 
would have been generally approved unless it served 
conveniently as a "preaching auditory*.*' This 
object was kept in view by Cromwell's Major General 
in building a church at Berwick upon Tweed as 
well as by Wren in replacing the churches which 
had been destroyed by the Fire. The builders of 
New England meeting houses did not make a new 
departure of their own, but merely followed suit. 
The old New England churches are for the most 
part Georgian, and are closely similar to those which 
were being erected in England during the same 
period. They testify to the continuous influence 
which the Mother Country exercised on the arts 
of life in the colonies. 

The meeting house was a part of the heritage 
derived from England, not only in its structural 
character, but in the variety of the purposes for which 
it was employed. The New England towns, in using 
their churches for secular meetings, were perpetuating 
a practice which had long been established in England. 

1 J. Graunt, Observations on Bills of Mortality, p. 78 in 
Hull's Economic Writings of Sir W. Petty, 11. 383. 



6o Public Buildings [CH. 

"In Elizabethan England, the Church of each parish 
was not only its place of worship but also the seat and 
centre for the transaction of all business concerning 
the parish^." Pubhc announcements were made 
there in regard to the perambulations of the parish, 
the repair of the highways and the straying of 
beasts 2, and vestries were held for the passing of 
accounts and the making of rates. In the attempts 
to enforce ecclesiastical discipline "the Church was 
turned for the time being into a small PoHce Court 
where all the parish scandal was carefully gone over 
and ventilated^." 

There was very little feeling that a church was 
a sacred place, and that behaviour in it should be 
reverent. During Elizabeth's visit to the University 
of Cambridge, the academic exercises were held in 
Great St Mary's Church, and the Queen was much 
interested in a disputation among members of the 
medical faculty, when Dr Lorkin defended the 
thesis "Coenandum liberalius, quam prandendum." 
A desire had been long cherished to provide a separate 



^ S. L. Ware, Elizabethan Parish, in Jolins Hopkins 
Historical Studies, Series xxvi. 314. 

2 In France and among the French in IlHnois the assemblies 
which regulated the management of pasturage were held at 
the church door after Mass. See C. W. Alvord, Introduction 
to Collections of Illinois Historical Library, 11. p. xxii. 

« S. L. Ware, op, cit, 316. 



Ill] Meeting Houses 6i 

building for the meetings of the members of the Senate 
and for academic functions ; but this was not carried 
into effect till 1722 1. The Baptists of Providence 
in Rhode Island were only reverting in 1775 to the 
old Cambridge tradition when they built a church 
for the "PubHc Worship of Almighty God and also 
for holding Commencement in." These early meeting 
houses help us to remember that some of the 
practices of colonial life, which are incongruous 
to modern ideas, were really derived from England. 

(iii) Renaissance Architecture, 

There was no marked difference during the 

Middle Ages between the architectural styles that 

were employed for ecclesiastical and for secular 

purposes; no particular style had specially sacred 

associations. In the same way it may be said that 

there was very little distinction between public 

buildings and private houses. The same sort of 

structure which served for the requirements of a 

large household, was regarded as appropriate for 

official business. The ancient manor house at 

Great Boothby, and the so-called Pythagoras School 

at Cambridge, are very similar to the Town Hall 

which was built for the new Winchelsea which 

1 Clark, ArchitecturalHistory of the University of Cambridge^ 
III. 46. 



62 Public Buildings [CH. 

Edward I founded in 1288. A similar parallelism 
can be found in Tudor times ; the mansions which 
were built by country gentlemen had many features 
in common with the official residences of the mayors, 
and the halls where the civic fathers exercised 
hospitality 1. In the eighteenth century, the features 
which were employed by architects to give dignity 
and importance to great private houses, were also 
available for public buildings intended for civic 
purposes. 

The end of the seventeenth and the eighteenth 
centuries have been rendered famous in the history 
of EngUsh Architecture by the mansions which were 
erected, though these houses do not eclipse the 
magnificence of the Tudor Period. Inigo Jones, 
Wren and their imitators, have left striking monu- 
ments in every part of the country. The pages of 

* In Scotland where the gentry continued to build fortified 
houses for themselves, the municipal buildings long retained 
something of the character of a peel-tower as in the Canongate 
Tolbooth (1591). Then a bell-tower, or steeple, which is an 
ordinary adjunct to a Scottish Town Hall, was required in 
a state of society where it was often necessary to summon the 
townsmen for the common defence (MacGibbon and Ross, 
Castellated and Domestic Architecture, v. 98). There are 
continental analogies not only for the Town Hall with an 
open arcade, but also for the fortified type. The Palazzo 
Vecchio at Florence is an early example. F. Bluntschli, 
Geh&ude ftir Verwaltung, etc. (1887), p. 6 in Durm, Handbuch 
der Architectur, iv. 



Ill] Renaissance Architecture 63 

Vitruvius Britannicus record the best examples of 
domestic architecture during this period, and the 
work was carried on through the eighteenth century 
by the Adam family. This remarkable era was 
reflected in the contemporary building in the 
American colonies when life had so far developed 
that it was possible to erect dignified houses for 
private residence and for public purposes. The 
beautiful colonial houses recall features that were 
novel and attractive in Renaissance work in England, 
especially in the prominence that has been given 
to the portico. There are, however, other features 
of special interest, which occur on both sides of the 
Atlantic, to which it is worth while to call special 
attention. 

The dome, or cupola as it used to be called, was 
alien to Gothic architecture and had no place in the 
tradition of Western Christendom; but the glory 
of S. Sophia compelled admiration, and that church 
set a type which was imitated both in the East 
and the West. It was accepted as a model by the 
architects of the Italian Renaissance, and excited 
great admiration when Wren introduced it in the 
rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral. Cupolas had 
been already employed in domestic architecture, 
as they form the crowning ornaments of Longleat 



64 Public Buildings [cH. 

(1568), and were also used in the Palace at Greenwich 
which was begun for Charles II, and was subse- 
quently completed under William and Mary^ as 
a hospital for seamen. A large single dome was the 
principal feature in the front of Castle Howard 
which was designed by Vanbrugh for the third 
Earl of Carlisle in 1702. So much intercourse was 
carried on between the southern plantations and the 
Mother Country in regard to building operations^, 
that there is every probability in the tradition that 
the Ridgely House (1784) at Hampton in Maryland, 
with its striking dome, was copied from Castle 
Howard^; though this may have been suggested 
by the dome in the design of the State House at 
Annapolis (1777). After that time the dome came 
to be commonly accepted as a prominent feature 
in public buildings; it was adopted by Jefferson 
in the University of Virginia ; and since it has been 
used with such excellent effect at Boston and in 
the Capitol at Washington, it has come to be 

1 Wren, Parentalia, 329. 

2 English bricks were imported for several colonial 
houses; the Court House at Williamsburg was designed by 
Wren, and Claremont in Surrey was copied at Claremont in 
Virginia. 

3 Captain Charles Ridgely who built the house at Hampton 
was connected with the Howards through his mother, Rachel 
Howard, and greatly admired Castle Howard which he visited 
about 1760. 



Ill] Renaissance Architecture 65 

regarded as specially appropriate to a State 
House. 

Castle Howard is of interest not only because 
of the cupola, but owing to its ground plan: there 
were two wings flanking the front and connected 
with the main building by colonnades. This scheme 
for the arrangement of a country house was found 
to be highly convenient, and was adopted in many 
mansions which did not make pretensions to magni- 
ficence. It was recommended by Ware^ for any 
gentleman who desired to build for "convenience 
more than magnificence," and to have the house 
"handsome though not pompous." The plan seems 
to have met the requirements of many of the Scottish 
gentry ; it had been already employed by Sir William 
Bruce at Kinross House (1685), and in quite a 
number of the designs which he made for houses 
in all parts of Scotland, William Adam, the father 
of the four more celebrated brothers, arranged the 
house and offices on these lines^. This plan for a 
country residence was widely known, and it is 

1 Ware, Complete Body of Architecture (1756), 406. 

2 W. Adam, Vitruvius Scoticits, Plates 19, 32, 39, 63, 86, 
88, 95, 112, 114, 116, 125, 139, 143, 159. This list is not by 
any means exhaustive of the examples of this model of 
country house in Scotland. Airds House in Appin, according 
to a monument in Lismore graveyard, was built by Robert 
Ker, mason, who died in 1738. Unfortunately the front has 
recently been rebuilt. 

c. 5 



66 Public Buildings [ch. 

represented in Virginia by the house which Washing- 
ton built at Mount Vernon ; where, as is commonly 
said, the wings formed convenient domestic offices 
for the slaves. 

(iv) The Stars and Stripes, 

So much of the argument as to historical con- 
nections in the preceding paragraph rests on the 
resemblances, that it is worth while to add a warning 
that such evidence, however suggestive it may be, 
can never be conclusive ; and that there is constant 
need to guard against placing too much reliance upon 
a likeness as proving an actual connection. The name 
of Washington suppHes a case in point. It is com- 
monly said that the United States flag was derived 
from the shield of the Washington family, which 
certainly contains stars and stripes. This is shown 
in a monument in Little St Mary's Church at Cam- 
bridge ^ ; the field is argent ; there are three mullets 
gules, or five-pointed stars, in chief, and three bars 
azure ; and there is a superficial resemblance to the 

* This was erected to the memory of Godfrey Washington, 
a fellow of Peterhouse who died in 1729. Mr Hulme {Flags 
of the World, 91) blazons the arms of Washington's great- 
great-grandfather, on a brass in Sulgrave Church, Northampton, 
as a white shield having two horizontal red bars and above 
these a row of three red stars. Washington's book plate has 
been reproduced by Mr P. L. Ford, The True George Washing- 
ton, 204. 



in] The Stars and Stripes 67 

American flag though there are also differences in the 
tinctures and position of the bars which should not 
be ignored. There is besides evidence of a direct 
connection which seems to set at rest any doubts 
that might be raised. We have an account of 
the occasion when the first order was given for the 
making of the Stars and Stripes ; and this seems to 
show that Washington took a personal part in 
designing the flag. *'A committee of congress 
accompanied by General Washington in June 1776 
called upon Mrs Ross who was an upholsterer, and 
engaged her to make the flag from a rough drawing, 
which at her suggestion was redrawn by General 
Washington in her back parlour^." Apparently, 
in his first sketch, Washington had drawn six- 
pointed stars, but he accepted Mrs Ross' suggestion 
that a five-pointed star would be better^. It is 
of course possible that Mrs Ross was acquainted 
with the General's shield^, or wished to make the 
stars on the flag five-pointed out of compliment 

1 Preble, History of the Flag of the United States of 
America, 266. 

2 Preble, op. cit. 265. 

3 Though Washington used his shield in his book plate, it 
may be doubted whether his coat of arms was familiar to his 
friends. The water mark of the writing paper, manufactured 
for him, sheets of which are preserved in the John Carter 
Brown Library at Providence, R.I., gives his name and his 
crest; but the shield is a fancy design and not that of the 
Washington family. 



68 Public Buildings [CH. 

to him. But, even though it may be possible that 
the selection of stars^ in the canton of the United 
States flag was connected with the Washington 
mullets, there is no reason for maintaining that 
the three bars were reproduced in the thirteen 
stripes. The United States flag differs from the 
Washington shield both in the arrangement of 
colour^ and in the number of the stripes ; and the 
thirteen red and white stripes had been already- 
adopted for the United Colonies, in what Was known 
as the Revolutionary flag, which was first hoisted 
at Boston on January 2, 1776; all that was done 
six months later was to displace the Union Jack 
which was the canton in the Revolutionary flag and 
to substitute the stars instead. The conjunction 
of mullets with bars in Washington's shield seems 
to have nothing to do with the association of stars 
with stripes on the American flag. 

There is no difficulty in identifying the source 
from which the stripes were really derived. A 

^ The emblem which was most favoured by the colonists 
seems to have been the rattle-snake, which was commended for 
its vigilance, for its character in never beginning an attack 
and never surrendering, and for generosity in giving notice 
with her rattle and warning her enemies against treading on 
her. Pennsylvania Journal, 27 Dec. 1775. Quoted by 
Preble, op. cit. 214. 

^ Hulme, op. cit. 90. 



Ill] The Stars and Stripes 69 

committee, consisting of Dr Franklin, Mr Lynch and 
Mr Harrison, had been appointed at Boston to 
confer with General Washington, in the camp at 
Cambridge, as to the best means of continuing and 
supporting a continental army^, and they appear 
to have also decided upon a flag for the cruisers which 
were being fitted out for the defence and protection 
of the United Colonies^. Curiously enough they 
determined to adopt, as their own, the flag which 
was already well known as the flag of the East 
India Company — a red ensign with six white stripes 2. 
This device would not seem inappropriate, as the 
militant colonists were still prepared to maintain 
that they were loyal to the King — though called 
upon to protest against his agents and ministers. 
None of these agents had been more offensive than 
the East India Company, by whom the chests of 
tea had been imported into Boston harbour*. Lord 
North^ had had an ingenious scheme for at once 
enabhng the East India Company to maintain their 
monopoly against illicit importation and at the 
same time to avoid the necessity of passing the 
tea through the Customs at Boston. As Franklin 

1 Franklin, Works. Ed. J. Spark, i. 400. 

2 Preble, op. cit. 211. 

3 Ibid. op. cit. 221. Hulme, op. cit. Plate vii. fig. 57. 

* R. Frothingham, Rise of Republic 0/ United States, 298. 
B Pari. Hist. xvii. 841 (27 April 1773). 



70 Public Buildings [ch. 

wrote from London^, "It was thought at the begin- 
ning of the session that the duty on tea would be 
taken off. But now the wise scheme is to take off 
so much duty here (London) as to make tea cheaper 
in America than foreigners can supply us, and to 
confine the duty there to keep up the exercise of 
the right." As Lord Chatham complained, the 
ministry renewed their intention to tax the colonies 
"under the pretence of serving the East India 
Company" and so dressed up "taxation, that father 
of American sedition, in the robes of an East India 
Director^." The "Mohawks" by raiding the East 
India Company's ships in Boston harbour had not 
only escaped "the trivial but tyrannous tax of three 
pence on the pound" but had flouted the great 
trading company, and they might be proud to 
flaunt the company's flag as a memento of that 
successful exploit 2. 

Events moved apace, however, and before 
Jan. 2, 1776, when the revolutionary flag was first 
displayed over the Continental Camp in Cambridge, 
the colonists found themselves engaged in undoubted 
rebellion against the King. The arrival of the news 



1 June 4, 1773. Works, ed. Spark, viii. 48. 

2 Pari. Hist. xvii. 1355 (27 May 1774). 

^ According to tradition the Black Prince adopted the 
badge of the Iving of Bohemia after Crecy. 



Ill] The Stars and Stripes 71 

as to the King's Speech on October 26, 1775, settled 
the matter; and the new flag was hoisted as a sign 
of defiance. Not unnaturally this display of the well 
known East India Company's flag was misinter- 
preted by the Royalists at Boston, and taken as 
*' a token of the deep impression the speech had made 
and a sign of submission^." No immediate action 
was taken to prevent the repetition of such mistakes, 
but six months later it was felt desirable to have a 
flag which should be really distinctive; this was 
effected by the simple expedient of displacing the 
Union Jack in the canton and substituting the 
Stars. The tradition as to the connection of the 
design with Washington personally seems to have 
a solid foundation in fact, but his coat of arms 
does not suffice to explain the conjunction of the 
different elements in the United States flag. 

^ Washington writing to J. Reed, 4 January 1776. Preble, 
op. cit. 218. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE COLLEGE COURSE^ 

(i) Emmanuel and Harvard. 

The similarity of institutions and habits in the 
Mother Country and in the Colonies renders it 
highly probable that an English influence was at 
work, but in any instances which can be specified 
as showing conscious imitation we may have com- 
plete confidence that we have come upon a real 
link of connection. The Honourable Artillery 
Company furnishes a case in point ; it had already 
existed in London for a century, when some members, 
who had emigrated to Massachusetts, decided to 
organise a branch in the New World. The Ancient 
and Honourable Artillery Company of Boston was 
founded in 1638; and the tie of kinship, which 
combines the two Companies together, is recognised 
on both sides of the Atlantic. Conscious imitation 
was found, not only with regard to the military 

^ Sesquicentennial Anniversary of Brown University, 
Providence, R.I. 



CH. iv] Emmanuel and Harvard 73 

training of citizens, but in higher education for 
civil Hfe as well; it is illustrated in the history 
of the Universities of America. Till the War of 
Independence, there were many men in the colonies 
who were conscious of their own debt to English or 
Scottish colleges and who were anxious to reproduce 
them, with suitable modifications, in the land of 
their adoption. John Harvard, in making provision 
for the College which bears his name, might have 
used the words of Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder 
of Emmanuel, who claimed that **he had set an 
acorn which, when it becomes an oak, God alone 
knows what will be the fruit thereof^.'* John 
Harvard was anxious that the young men of the 
Bay State should have the opportunity of coming 
under influences similar to those which he had 
prized in his Cambridge days. Emmanuel College 
was a centre of Puritan teaching; and in Harvard's 
time it had been one of the foremost academic 
institutions of the day ; no less than eleven of the 
seventeen Heads of Colleges during the Common- 
wealth Period came from its walls; to Fuller it 
seemed to overshadow all the University 2. Em- 
manuel had been founded with the special object 
of providing men for the ministry; and pains had 

* Mullinger, History of the University oj Cambridge, ii. 312. 
^ Mullinger, op. cit. 11. 314. 



74 ^^^ College Course [ch. 

been taken in framing the Statutes to secure that 
graduates who had quaHfied as Doctors of Divinity 
should not be content to lead an academic life, but 
should go out into the world as learned ministers. 
John Harvard was in complete sympathy with the 
spirit of his own College, and he endeavoured to 
transplant the methods of instruction by which his 
mind had been disciplined. The tutorial system of 
the colleges dominated English Academic life in 
the seventeenth century; the public exercises in 
the University had fallen into discredit, especially 
in the Divinity Faculty, where the discussion of 
burning questions was formal and pedantic. King 
Henry VIII had attempted to revive professorial 
teaching; but the public lectures of the Regius 
Professors had not proved to be an effective substi- 
tute for intimate personal intercourse with a tutor, 
who was devoting himself to the intellectual and 
religious training of the boys entrusted to his charge. 
Strict discipline over all the habits of life, with 
facilities for reading and daily association with men 
of earnest piety and scholarly mind, had been the 
characteristic training at Emmanuel; and this was 
the system which Harvard desired to transplant 
when he founded a college in a new Cambridge^. 

* The account which Pierce has preserved of the schedules 
of subjects for the various years at Harvard College in 1734 



iv] Emmanuel and Harvard 75 

In the eighteenth century however, this Puritan 
College in Massachusetts was no longer adequate 
for the requirements of the community in which 
it was established. No provision had been made 
for the faculties of Law and Medicine; and the 
literary course did not seem to be well adapted for 
those who desired to pursue such studies. Various 
changes, which relaxed the old discipline, and 
interfered with the old routine, were introduced at 
Harvard, in spite of the protests of those who were 
attached to the old system of training through strict 
discipline and personal influence. In 1701 Mather 
and his friends were enabled, by Eli Yale's muni- 
ficence, to establish a new college, in which the old 
academic tradition could be more carefully pre- 
served, at New Haven in Connecticut. This new 
foundation was not the outcome of any desire to 
make a fresh departure in academic life; it was 
due to a conservative reaction, and shows the 
unwillingness of the men of New England to break 
away from the methods of teaching and organisation 
which had prevailed at Emmanuel in the seventeenth 
century. The old tradition was an important element 
in academic life in the New World, and has left its 

shows that the Emmanuel tradition was being kept up. 
Pierce, History of Harvard, Appendix I. pp. 4 and 6 and 
Appendix xx. pp. 2 and 6. 



76 The College Coiirse [CH. 

mark in the functions discharged by discipUnary 
officers, and in the time devoted to recitations. 
Though the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge with 
their tutorial system have long ceased to be regarded 
in America as models to be consciously imitated, 
there seems to be a movement in favour of strengthen- 
ing this element in college Hfe both at Harvard 
and Princeton. 

(ii) The Scottish Universities, 

There were fresh attempts about the middle of 

the eighteenth century in different States to make 

better provision for academic education, but those 

who were trying to devise a suitable course of study 

no longer looked for guidance to England. They 

had out-lived the English college as transplanted to 

American soil; and the Enghsh Universities had 

entered on a period of stagnation ; they were making 

no new developments, and were in many ways 

unsuited to the conditions of colonial life. On the 

other hand the Scottish Universities were beginning 

to take a lead in many departments. David Gregory 

was a pioneer in reforming the study of Mathematics^. 

1 -'He had already caused several of his scholars to keep 
Acts as we call them, upon several branches of the Newtonian 
philosophy; while we at Cambridge, poor wretches, were 
ignominiously studying the fictitious hypotheses of the 
Cartesians." Whiston quoted by Grant, Story of the University 
oj Edinburgh, il. 297. 



iv] The Scottish Universities 77 

The lectures which Hugh Blair delivered as Professor 
of Rhetoric in Edinburgh long held their place as a 
textbook. Thomas Raid's System of Philosophy 
continued to be the bulwark of orthodoxy; and 
Adam Smith, as Professor of Moral Philosophy 
at Glasgow, gave us the first scientific exposition of 
PoHtical Economy. That such men studied and 
worked in Scottish Universities is a sufficient testi- 
mony to the vigorous intellectual life of these 
mstitutions. 

There was, moreover, another feature which 
would more especially commend them to colonists 
who were endeavouring to organise facilities for 
academic study. The Scottish Universities were 
organised with careful consideration for the require- 
ments of the community as a whole, and the ecclesi- 
astical element, though important, was subordinate. 
This was especially true of Edinburgh University, 
which had been from the first closely interconnected 
with the civil life of the town. The Lord Provost 
and Town Council appear to have taken the initiative 
in the establishment and endowment of this seat 
of learning^, and they obtained complete responsi- 
bihty for its management in the Charter given by 
King James VI in 1582. They had not only the 
* Grant, Stofy of the University of Edinburgh, i. 99. 



78 The College Course [cH. 

management of the funds, but of the staff; they 
had to make appointments of Regents and Pro- 
fessors, and they intervened again and again to 
decide purely academical matters, such as the course 
of studies which should be pursued. The constitution 
of the pre-Reformation Scottish Colleges was also 
modified so as to give greater prominence to civil 
authorities. 

Academic life in Edinburgh had little of the 
distinctive feature of a college. The students had 
no common dining hall^; and, from the first, there 
was a large proportion of out-college students, who 
resided under parental authority at home, or, in 
the case of students from the country, with house- 
holders whom their parents trusted. College disci- 
plme was supplementary to that of home and not a 
substitute for it. The close supervision and frequent 
intercourse, which were the main features of the 
tutorial system, never took root in Edinburgh, 
The work of the Regents was that of instructors, 
who conducted their pupils through all the different 
subjects of their course and who acted as lecturers 
rather than personal guides, philosophers and friends. 

There was another feature which characterised 
the Scottish Universities ; the formal and systematic 
study of English was regarded as important. After 

1 Grant, op. cit, i. 140. 



iv] The Scottish Universities 79 

the Union, the Scots looked to England, and the 
colonies which England had planted, as a field for 
the exercise of their talents; they recognised that 
they would be handicapped, if they spoke and wrote 
in a northern dialect, and it was important that 
they should have command of the best models of 
English. A great deal of attention was given to the 
cultivation of English style by Scotsmen in the 
early part of the eighteenth century^; and, under 
the influence of Lord Karnes, systematic instruction 
in taste and composition by Adam Smith was 
provided at Edinburgh in 17482. A regular pro- 
fessorship was founded in 1762. The study of the 
English language, together with the cultivation of 
oratory based on English models, in Scotland was 
in marked contrast with the neglect in English 
Universities, but the attention given to this subject 
is in accordance with the practice which has been 
maintained in the colleges in the American colonies. 
A great step in academic progress had been 
taken by the Town Council of Edinburgh in 1708, 



1 Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen, i. 4. 

2 Grant, op. cit. 1. 276. It is noticeable however that as 
late as 1704 the Town Council, in laying down principles of 
College discipline, had insisted that all students were obliged 
to speak in Latin, and those who spoke EngUsh in the College 
were liable to be fined. Bower, History of the University of 
Edinburgh, 11. 37. 



8o The College Course [ch. 

when they approved of the scheme of reform which 
was advocated by WilUam Carstares. Appoint- 
ments were henceforth to be made to professorships 
of one particular subject, so that the students had 
the opportunity of attending the instruction of men, 
who had each specialised in his own subject, instead 
of receiving their instruction in all subjects from 
the same Regent. The change was carried out by 
relieving each of the Regents of all responsibility 
for certain subjects, and allowing him to concentrate 
on a branch of study in which he was personally 
interested. This important improvement had already 
been adopted in Holland, and it gave facilities for 
the constant enlargement of the scope of academic 
studies. This change of system almost necessarily 
involved the laying down of a definite curriculum 
of study, as it seemed desirable to decide the order in 
which students should attend the lectures of the 
different professors. The principles on which this 
scheme was founded are explained in a Minute of 
the Town Council of i6th Jan.^ The first year was 

1 Bower, ii. 70-72. "The council taking to their con- 
sideration what may be the most proper methods for 
advancing of learning in their own college of Edinburgh, have 
agreed upon the following articles as a rule of teaching in 
the said college: — Primo, That all the parts of philosophy- 
be taught in two years, as they are in the most famous 
universities abroad. Secundo, That, as a consequence of this 
article, there be but two philosophy classes in the college, to 



IV The Scottish Universities 8i 

mainly occupied with Latin, the second with Greek, 
the third with Logic and the last with Natural 
Philosophy; but there were also professorships of 
Mathematics and Moral Philosophy in connection 
with the Arts Course; while provision had also 
been made for the Faculties of Divinity, Medicine 
and Law. 

Sir Robert Sibbald, who had succeeded in 
securing the royal approval for the organisation 

be taught by two of the four present professors of philosophy. 
Tevtio, That, in the first of these classes, the students be taught 
logic and metaphysics ; and in the last, a compend of ethics 
and natural philosophy. Quarto, Because there are many 
useful things belonging to the pneumatics and moral philo- 
sophy, which the two professors, in the present method of 
teaching classes, cannot overtake, therefore it is proposed 
that one of the two remaining professors shall be appointed 
to teach those two parts of philosophy more fully, at such 
times as the students are not obliged to be in their classes; 
and because he has not the charge of a class, he may have 
public lessons of philosophy in the common hall, where all 
the students may be present, at such times as shall be most 
convenient. Quinto, That there shall be a fixed professor of 
Greek; but so that neither he nor his successors shall, upon 
any pretence whatsoever, endeavour to hinder the admission 
of students into the philosophy classes in the usual manner, 
although they have not been taught Greek by him. Sexto, 
And, in regard the present professors have given proof of 
their quahfications in all the parts both of philosophy and 
Greek, therefore, when any of these four professors places 
become vacant, the remaining professors of these now in 
places, alternately shall have the offer of the vacancy according 
to their standing ; and, when one chooses it, the rest shall, in 
the like manner, be allowed to succeed him...." 

c. 6 



82 The College Course [ch. 

of a college of physicians in Edinburgh (1681) was 
appointed in 1685 by the Town Council to be the 
first professor of Physic; and he secured a status 
for those practitioners who had studied medicine, 
and were not mere quacks. The lack of opportunity 
for prosecuting the study of law at home had been 
severely felt by Scotsmen, and they had been forced 
to go for instruction in the Civil Law to Leyden 
or Utrecht. To remedy this defect, Alexander 
Cunningham was appointed professor of the Civil 
Law in Scotland by Parliament in 1698; but he 
mainly devoted himself to research and publication, 
and the Town Council established a teaching pro- 
fessorship of Civil Law at Edinburgh in 1710. 
Edinburgh University, as reformed by the Town 
Council on the advice of William Carstares, set 
an example which the other Scottish Universities 
adopted in turn — Glasgow in 1727, St Andrews in 
1747 and Aberdeen in 1754. This reformed and 
vigorous academic Hfe, north of the Tweed, could 
not fail to attract the attention of those who were 
desirous of promoting higher education in the 
American colonies. 



iv] Princeton and Edinburgh 83 

(iii) Princeton and Edinburgh. 

The main lines of academic instruction remained 
unaltered in Scottish Universities from 1708 till 
1893, though some additional subjects had been 
introduced. The curriculum had become very rigid 
at that time, and it was in many ways similar in 
type to the college course which had been found 
suitable for American requirements. But too much 
stress must not be laid on mere likeness ; the question 
arises whether this resemblance is merely accidental, 
or whether there are real links of connection between 
the academic Hfe of Scotland and that of America. 
It is of course possible that the family likeness is 
due to a common ancestry, and that the American 
like the Scottish College Course was derived directly 
from Holland. We may remember, however, that 
the academic intercourse between Scotland and 
Holland was chiefly due to the necessity of studying 
the Civil Law which was administered in both 
countries, and that there was no similar reason for 
English colonists to resort to Leyden. There is no 
evidence of much academic intercourse between the 
colonies and Holland in the middle of the eighteenth 
century; and Princeton, the third great American 
College, was founded in a region where there was 
no direct connection with Holland; while the ties 

6—2 



84 The College Course [ch. 

with Scotland were close and intimate. A large 
number of Scottish Presbyterians had settled in 
New Jersey, and they took an active part in inducing 
the State to found the College at Princeton in 1746. 
This was primarily a Presbyterian institution, though 
its doors were open to the young men of other 
denominations, who desired to be trained for the 
ministry, and Princeton has exercised a very wide 
influence on academic life in the United States. 
The first off-shoot from the New Jersey College was 
due to the desire of the Baptists to obtain a better 
status than they had been able to secure at Prince- 
ton. When the State of Rhode Island established 
the college, which is now known as Brown University, 
the conditions under which the Scottish Universities 
had prospered appear to have been borne in mind, 
and the importance of civil, as compared with 
ecclesiastical authority, is symbolised by the promi- 
nent place which the Sheriff still takes in academic 
ceremonial of every kind. 

Numbers of Scottish graduates migrated to 
America at the close of the seventeenth and beginning 
of the eighteenth century, and it seems highly 
probable that the experience and methods of the 
Scottish Universities should have been consciously 
taken into account. In the decade from 1670 to 1680 



iv] Princeton and Edinburgh 85 

there was a large influx of Scottish Presbyterians 
from Ulster^ ; and another body of reHgious refugees 
escaped from Scotland after the defeat of the Cove- 
nanters at Bothwell Bridge (1679). This particular 
expedition was organised by William Dunlop^, who 
continued to minister to the settlers after they 
reached Carolina, and who subsequently returned 
to Scotland and was appointed Principal of Glasgow 
University^. Not all the ministers who migrated 
with the Presbyterian refugees or followed them 
afterwards were men of such academic distinction, 
but, if they were as loyal to their native institutions 
as Scotsmen usually are, they may be credited with 
a wish to reproduce in the New World the system 
of training with which they were familiar at home. 
Two at least of those who took an active part in the 
estabUshment of the New College at Princeton were 
familiar with the Scottish system. Dr Tennant*, 
who was one of the prime movers in the establish- 
ment of Princeton, as well as Dr Witherspoon, who 
took an activepart in its development, were graduates 
of Edinburgh, and thus we can point to a channel 
through which the Scottish methods of teaching 
may have found their way to American Colleges. 

1 Briggs, American Presbyteriamsm, 115. ^ Ibid. 127. 

8 William Carstares who initiated the College Course at 
Edinburgh was his brother-in-law and cousin. 
'" Princeton Sesquicentennial volume, 325. 



86 The College Course [ch. 

The influence which Scotsmen have exercised on 
American institutions cannot be easily gauged. The 
Scots in the eighteenth century failed to found any 
colony which was a reproduction of the Scottish 
polity^. The Darien colony was a disastrous failure ; 
and Scotland was more concerned in the eighteenth 
century with consolidating her own national life, 
than with attempting national expansion. 

There are many areas, like the Huron tract in 
Canada, and Dunedin in New Zealand, where 
Scottish settlers are numerous; but they have not 
established separate polities, with distinctive insti- 
tutions, in the nineteenth century; and they had 
no opportunity of doing so before. The framework 
of society had been transplanted from England to 
America and the Scots fitted themselves into it 
as best they could. The pride of ancestry in New 
England has taken the form of tracing descent from 
the Pilgrim Fathers and from families in Devonshire 
and the Eastern Counties. The various colonies 
derived their religious character from different bodies 
of English Nonconformists, the Independents estab- 
lished themselves at Massachusetts and Connecticut, 
the Baptist imposed his principles on Rhode Island, 

1 The most successful attempts were in New Jersey and 
Carolina. Keith, Commercial Relations of England and 
Scotland, 131. 



iv] Princeton and Edinburgh 87 

the Quaker presided over the development of Penn- 
sylvania, while Roman Catholics found Maryland 
a congenial soil. It seems as if the Scot had had no 
footing in the New World, and that there was no 
basis from which he could play a part in moulding 
American civilisation. But though there was no 
local centre which was officially organised on 
Scottish lines the influence which has been exercised 
by Scotsmen, individuall}^ and personally, has been 
very real ; especially as regards the religious history 
of the United States. It was from Scotland that 
Presbyterianism was transplanted, and it was through 
the energy of a Scotsman that Episcopalians were 
enabled to organise Episcopal government and to 
introduce a Prayer Book. It is at least interesting 
to speculate as to the extent of Scottish influence 
on the Colleges, where the ministers of all denomina- 
tions were trained, and in which the intellectual 
life of the United States has been so deeply moulded. 
If the founding of polities of their own were the 
only method by which an influence could be brought 
to bear on new countries and little developed lands, 
the smaller nations might fear that they were 
excluded from having any share in moulding the 
civihsation that is spreading through the world; 
but much of the progress of mankind may go on 
through personal action and not by the planting 



88 The College Course [ch. 

of institutions. Science and Art are cosmopolitan; 
they may be encouraged and developed in one 
country rather than another, but the pubHshed 
results of progress in experimental knowledge become 
available for all. Officialism cannot monopolise 
them, and has not proved itself the most effective 
agent for their transmission. The people of a country 
which fails to found distant colonies are not thereby 
debarred from making important contributions to 
the moral, intellectual and material progress of 
every part of the world. 

(iv) Public Libraries, 

Scottish influence seems to have done much in 
moulding academic institutions in America; but 
the endeavour to organise public libraries, which are 
such a prominent feature in American civihsation, 
must be traced to a different source; they are 
a mark of the far reaching influence of the ecclesi- 
astical revival which occurred at the close of the 
seventeenth century in England. Facilities for the 
educated reader are not so wholly modern as we 
are apt to suppose; the fifteenth century was a 
remarkable period in the history of libraries. Before 
the invention of printing, when books were few and 
precious, monasteries, cathedrals and secular insti- 
tutions vied with one another in erecting libraries. 



iv] Public Libraries 89 

in stocking them with books, and in framing liberal 
regulations for making them useful to the public^. 
These ancient collections were ruthlessly broken up 
and destroyed at the Reformation, but some attempt 
was made to diffuse the new teaching in England 
by encouraging people to read for themselves: the 
public had the opportunity of frequenting church 
in order to read the printed Bible; and other 
books, such as Foxe's Martyrs, Jewel's Apology, 
were occasionally available for the use of parishioners. 
Here and there benefactions were left to found 
parochial libraries, partly for the benefit of the 
incumbent, who might be too poor to buy books, 
and partly for the "edification of the common 
people^. ' ' These Ubraries were sufficiently important 
in the early eighteenth century to be made the sub- 
ject of legislation and an act of parliament was 
passed for their better regulation and preservation^. 

This system spread to the colonies. Dr Thomas 
Bray, who had been appointed commissary in 
Maryland by Bishop Compton of London, regarded 
parochial libraries as essential to his undertaking; 
he devoted much time to the collecting of books, 

1 J. W. Clark, Care of Books, 245. 

2 H. Cheetham's Will, quoted by R. C. Christie. Old 
Church Libraries of Lancashire, 20. 

8 7 Anne, c. 14. 



go The College Course [ch. iv 

and took with him works worth £2400 when he 
sailed to the New World. He aimed at instituting 
lending libraries for the public at large, and he 
issued one or two publications in which he explained 
his project, and put forward a system of classifying 
the books. A network of libraries was established 
in Maryland, with Annapolis as the centre ; and the 
system was extended to South CaroHna^, New 
York and other States; one of the libraries was 
planted in connection with King's Chapel at Boston. 
The movement continued to grow during the first 
twenty years of the eighteenth century; but as an 
adjunct to the Protestant Episcopal Church, it never 
attained a wide popularity; the arrangements for 
maintaining the libraries and purchasing additional 
books were inadequate ; the scheme languished and 
became moribund before the Revolution. The 
pioneers of public libraries in the States were eager 
to diffuse religious knowledge, and progress became 
more rapid when the library movement was strong 
enough to stand upon its own feet. Its original 
connection with the English parochial system is 
all the more interesting, because that system had 
such a slight hold on the New World. 

* The State Legislature passed in 1700 a law for the 
custody of the books at Charlestown. Steiner, Dr T. Bray 
and his American Libraries in Am. Hist. Rev. 11. 70. 



CHAPTER V 

MODERN SOCIAL PROBLEMS i 

(i) Patriarchal and Progressive Societies. 

The character of social duties, and the methods 
of discharging social responsibilities, differ greatly 
in a progressive as compared with a stationary 
state of society. This is the fundamental difference 
between the East and the West to-day, and it is 
also a contrast between Christendom, as it was in 
the Middle Ages, and Western Europe as we know 
it in modern times. Under a natural economy, 
such as obtained very generally in the Early Middle 
Ages, personal qualities were the main factor in the 
management of affairs of every kind. The firmness 
and kindliness, which are the abiding influence within 
the domestic circle, were brought into play on a 
large scale to maintain good order in monastic and 
manorial establishments; public and private affairs 
could not be distinguished or treated apart. Wise 
regulation and conscious dependence were the 

* Massachusetts Technocological Institute, Boston, Mass. 



92 Modern Social Problems [cH. 

conditions of prosperity. A traditional system of 
common cultivation of the soil, and of providing 
maintenance for the labourers, was carried on for 
centuries, and it served its purpose in what was 
practically a stationary state of society. Mediaeval 
authorities endeavoured to secure that every man 
should have the necessities of life; but there was 
no attempt to distinguish the services of individuals 
and to give them comforts or luxuries according 
to their personal worth to the community. Roger 
Bacon, the greatest inventor and most advanced 
scientific man of the thirteenth century, had the 
necessaries of life assigned him, and no more. The 
serf who ploughed the lord's domain had the means 
of securing the necessities of life and no more. The 
chief political problem of the day was that of main- 
taining such law and order that it should be possible 
for all to enjoy the means of subsistence assigned 
them; and the chief economic problem was that 
of organising administrative machinery to ensure 
that each individual should put in his fair share of 
work, and thus should prove himself to be worth 
his keep^. The organisation of the monastery or 
of the manor was devoted to attempts to procure 
from all those who were labouring in the community 
enough work and sufficiently good work to enable 
^ Gunningham, Christianity and Economic Science, 27. 



v] The Black Death 93 

them to justify their position as members of the 
community. Similarly the whole of the gild organi- 
sation in mediaeval towns was devoted to insuring 
to each qualified craftsman his share in the industry 
of the town, and to seeing that he was so qualified 
that his work should be a credit to the town. It 
necessarily followed, from this system of organisa- 
tion, that each centre of regulation should be self- 
centred, if not isolated, and that the threads which 
connected the different communities into one realm 
should be of the slightest. 

The mediaeval system broke down after the 
national catastrophe known as the Black Death; 
so far as the management of land was concerned, 
it could no longer be maintained. The tyranny of 
custom in the cultivation of common fields and 
pasturage on common waste was proving extrava- 
gant, and the f ertihty of the soil was being exhausted. 
There were, besides, various causes at work which 
tended to disintegrate society, and which caused 
the labourers to revolt against conscious dependence 
on the manorial lords. The rural labourers demanded, 
in a time of great national distress, that the rates 
of wages should be substantially raised in accordance 
with the law of demand and supply, and refused 
to conform to the old system of regulation. They 



94 Modern Social Problems [ch. 

eagerly asserted the claims of the individual to the 
personal reward which he himself earned, and 
unconsciously they introduced the conditions which 
were favourable to the growth of a progressive 
society. 

It is not easy to gauge the precise gain and loss 
of this change, which marks the beginning of com- 
petition rates of wages for labour and of all the 
social problems which are still unsolved. It is 
difficult to say how far the pecuniary gain to the 
labourers was discounted at once by a rise of prices, 
and was lost in the following century, owing to the 
diminution and irregularity of employment. It 
seems doubtful whether there was any gain to the 
masses of the population, in the way of material 
comfort ; but there was an increased sense of inde- 
pendence, and a consciousness of being more fairly 
treated. Moreover, the economic gain to society 
was enormous, as the change opened up all sorts 
of possibilities of improvement, through the scope 
that was now allowed to individual enterprise. But 
it is not obvious whether the new conditions were 
really beneficial to the masses of the peasantry, 
who were set free from customary obligations, but 
their customary privileges were endangered. They 
were set free from dependence on authority, of 
which they were conscious and which was irritating 



v] Material Progress 95 

and galling; but they came to be directly exposed 
to the play of economic forces of which they were 
for the most part unconscious, and to suffering 
which appeared inexplicable. To the energetic man 
it was an immense advantage to enjoy more freedom 
and to have his claims to be paid, according to the 
worth of his own work, recognised. Since that time, 
a new method of applying the principle of justice 
has dominated social arrangements, and society 
encourages a man to expect to receive the worth 
of that which he himself contributes to the wealth 
of society, instead of endeavouring to force him to 
produce a sufficient equivalent for his maintenance. 

Among men of the English race it would be 
generally agreed that the transition from a stationary 
to a progressive society has been beneficial, not only 
to the community as a whole, but to a very large 
proportion of the men and women who compose 
society. It may be doubted if there is any class 
whose standard of material comfort has gone down 
since the Middle Ages, and multitudes now enjoy 
comforts and luxuries which were unattainable, 
even by the rich, in former times. But we need not 
forget that there has always been incidental suffering 
in connection with material progress; and it is 
quite likely that some tribes and peoples are as 



96 Modern Social Problems [cH. 

happy in a condition of dependence, and in a 
stationary state, as they would be if opportunities 
of progress were open to them ; indeed some of them 
may be at their best economically in such conditions. 
It is not quite clear that all the races of mankind 
are fitted for free institutions or ready to adapt them- 
selves to a progressive society. The question whether 
economic independence for individuals should be 
established throughout the whole area of the United 
States was the underlying issue in the Civil War; 
history repeated itself but with a difference. In 
England the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was a 
dehberate rising to secure economic independence; 
in America the North regarded economic indepen- 
dence as a boon which the South ought to be 
compelled to accept. Serfdom had not been entirely 
extinguished in England at the time when Virginia 
was planted, and the Englishman who settled there 
found it convenient to transplant manorial institu- 
tions. In a southern soil, with facilities for procuring 
imported labour, there was a reversion to an old 
type of social organisation, and it was reproduced 
in a very stringent form. The patriarchal system 
of responsibility for the maintenance of individuals 
and of compulsion to make them earn the worth 
of their keep, was regarded by southern gentlemen 
as the only possible method on which the material 



v] Local Interests 97 

prosperity of the Southern States could be main- 
tained, and as the system in which the negro showed 
himself at his best. In England and America aHke, 
there was an appeal to force in order to break down 
the old system; but, as we look back, we may 
realise how little force can do in the way of recon- 
struction, and how much time is required to enable 
a new order to establish itself. 

The two centuries which succeeded the Black 
Death were a period of transition when the old 
order was breaking up in England, and modern 
society was beginning to take shape; it was only 
gradually that modern problems emerged into clear 
light ; but from the time of EHzabeth onwards there 
have been successive efforts to deal with them. 
An attempt even to state them shows how complex 
modern life has become. There is on the one hand 
the conflict between the interests of localities and 
the welfare of the realm as a whole; in mediaeval 
times, it seemed natural and right that the interests 
of the locality should be the primary consideration, 
for there was difficulty in grasping the conception 
of the realm as a whole and in treating it as 
a worthy object to which local interests ought to 
be subordinatedo There was need not only for the 
growth of common sentiment throughout the whole 

c. 7 



98 Modern Social Problems [cH. 

community, but also for recognising the solidarity 
of interests throughout the realm, and the fact 
that localities would benefit indirectly and in the 
long run, by co-operating for the common weal. 

Similarly in the large territorial areas of a modern 
country there is a conflict between the interest of 
the individuals and the interest of the State: the 
national life is longer than the life of the individual, 
and the present generation will not enjoy the benefit 
of any sacrifices that are made now, for the sake of 
the future : when we review a long period of time, 
individual welfare and national prosperity are seen 
not to be opposed to one another ; but from moment 
to moment they fall apart. Individual loss of some 
kind is almost an inevitable incident in national 
economic progress. The introduction of new 
machinery is at first an injury to certain classes 
of labourers, even though it be a gain to the com- 
munity as a whole. With the constant change in 
the organisation of production, the worth of each 
individual's contribution to the work of the world 
varies from time to time; we need not expect to 
find a benefit to society reflected immediately and 
directly in improvements in the lot of individuals ; 
but time affords opportunities for readjustment, 
and in the long run national and individual interests 
are reconciled. The improvements which open up 



v] The Realm as a whole 99 

new opportunities and powers to the nation as a 
whole, also benefit the individuals who will form 
the community in time to come, even though each 
step in progress is fraught with mischief for those 
who are unable to adapt themselves to the change. 
There is a constant difficulty in taking proper 
account of the various elements which make up 
the prosperity of society. It is comparatively easy 
to reckon the material progress of the community, 
and to estimate in terms of money the resources 
of the realm, and the opportunities which wealth 
opens up both to the community as a whole and to 
individuals. But, the character and the health of 
the citizens are national possessions which evade 
the economic calculus^. The most important elements 
in national welfare cannot be included in pecuniary 
estimates, and we need to take account of broader 
considerations, which may be termed political, in 
trying to gauge the prosperity of a community. 

(ii) The Elizabethan Realm. 

The Elizabethan age was a time of many great 
achievements; but nothing is more remarkable, as 
a piece of constructive legislation, than the elaborate 
scheme which was started for controlling the whole 
industrial life of the country both in the towns and 
^ MaxshaM, Principles of Economics, i. 8i. 

7—2 



100 Modern Social Problems [CH. 

in rural districts. The separatism of different manors 
and municipalities was superseded by the organisa- 
tion of the realm as a whole, and a serious effort 
was made to draw the various parts of the country 
out of their isolation so that they might co-operate 
for the realm. A series of measures was enacted 
to secure the training of workmen, to ensure fair 
rates of wages, and to provide for the unemployed; 
but no attempt was made to set up a rigid system 
with hard and fast rules ; the legislature estabhshed 
a very flexible administrative system; and the 
magistrates, whether they were landed gentry or 
substantial townsmen, were the agents who adminis- 
tered it in detail, under constant supervision by 
the Council. 

The precise measures which were appropriate 
to England in the sixteenth century have long since 
passed away and the administrative machinery has 
been superseded ; but one lasting result was secured. 
WilHam Cecil gave a lead in attempting to deal 
with modern problems systematically, and he induced 
the wealthy classes of the community to take a 
deeper interest in the prosperity of the realm as 
a whole. 

The sentiment of loyalty to the Crown was more 
powerful during the Elizabethan age than ever 
before, since the Norman Conquest. The union of 



v] The Elizabethan Realm loi 

the two houses had left the Tudor Kings without a 
rival, and focused the national sentiment on a 
particular line of succession. Elizabeth was person- 
ally careful to foster the element of romance which 
attached to a Virgin Queen, and the various plots 
against her life were skilfully used to make the 
pubHc feel that the national independence of England 
was bound up in the security of the Crown. This 
loyalty was displayed in the personal devotion of 
courtiers, and in the homilies of churchmen on the 
duties of citizens. The landed men were specially 
responsive to this feeling, and were proud of being 
entrusted with the Queen's commission and of the 
social responsibilities laid upon them as Justices of 
the Peace. 

It was at this era too that the solidarity of the 
interests of the realm became more apparent. In 
the fifteenth century and part of the sixteenth, the 
pecuniary interest of the landlords had not coincided 
either with that of the villagers or of the realm as 
a whole. As the result of changes in the position 
of labour, the landlords had found it to their interest 
to discontinue bailiff farming, and to utilise the 
area which they were able to control for the feeding 
of sheep, and the sale of wool. Expenses were cut 
down and the increase of money rentals appears 
to have been considerable, but the depopulating of 



102 Modern Social Problems [CH. 

one village after another was a loss to the population 
and to the food supply of the realm. The develop- 
ment of corn markets during the EHzabethan period 
made an extraordinary change. With better oppor- 
tunities for the sale of corn it ceased to be to the 
interest of landlords to use the land for pasture 
farming; with the introduction of convertible 
husbandry the landlords found it most profitable 
for themselves and for their heirs to use the land for 
the increase of the food supply, and the employment 
of the rural population; and thus their personal 
interests came to coincide with those of the realm. 
There was a protracted conflict in rural districts 
between the old view of taking account primarily 
of local welfare, and the new view of developing 
each locaUty so that it might contribute as much 
as possible to the prosperity of the realm. The 
maintenance of the township, as an economic unit, 
and of its customary cultivation, was inconsistent 
with employing the soil of England to the best pur- 
pose as regards the nation as a whole. The landlords 
became, during the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries, the willing agents of the change by which 
the management of the land was controlled more 
and more with the view of increasing the food supply 
and meeting the requirements of the realm as a 
whole. 



v] The Elizabethan Realm 103 

The merchants and manufacturers, who had had 
the tradition of subordinating personal interests to 
the welfare of a civic community, also began to 
realise that, in the larger circle which was opening 
up to them, political action was the basis on which 
their pecuniary success rested. They were no longer 
content to cater for the town market, or buy and 
sell to merchants who visited this country; they 
were anxious to push their trade and have access 
to distant markets. The opportunities for trading 
abroad, and for engaging in profitable commerce, 
depended on the concessions that the Crown secured 
for them from foreign powers, or the privileges 
accorded to such associations as the East India 
Company, or the Hudson Bay Company. The 
interests of the manufacturers who catered for 
distant markets, and of the richer merchants, were 
bound up with those of the realm, and trade and 
industry were directly dependent on the success of 
the Crown in securing and enforcing the privileges 
of subjects. 

There can be no more striking testimony to the 
strength of the sentiment of loyalty to the Crown, 
in England in the seventeenth century, than the 
fact that in spite of so many discouragements the 
tradition was so deeply rooted among the American 



I04 Modern Social Problems [CH, 

colonists. One might have supposed that in New 
England it would have been extinguished altogether. 
The Pilgrim Fathers came of a stock which was 
thoroughly dissatisfied with the action of King 
Charles I and his ministers, and neither the Restora- 
tion monarchy, nor the Hanoverians, would commend 
the institution of royalty to them. They were 
conscious of many disabilities in the restrictions 
imposed on their trade and development; they 
seemed to profit little by the protection which 
Britain afforded against France, and their distant 
sovereign did not show an intelligent sympathy in 
regard to them or their affairs. And yet the tie with 
the Crown was one which many of them were by 
no means ready to break ; their loyalty entailed an 
immense amount of suffering at the time of the War 
of Independence on the loyalists of Massachusetts^. 

(iii) The Nation and its Dependencies. 

The political sentiment which was dominant in 
the country in the eighteenth century was very 
different from that which had prevailed in the time 
of Elizabeth. The sentiment of loyalty to the 
Crown had waned during the distractions of the Civil 
War, and the disappointments of the Restoration; 

• Spark, The Loyalists of MassachtiseUs» 



v] The Nation and its Dependencies 105 

but on the other hand new ambitions were being 
opened up. England from being an unimportant 
kingdom had grown to be the victor over Spain, 
and a rival to France in a struggle for world power. 
She was no longer called on to defend her own shores, 
but she was eager to preserve the possibilities of 
expansion which then lay within her reach. Such 
defensive warfare is closely akin to aggression; 
Englishmen, and especially the monied men, were 
keenly alive to the poHtical importance of main- 
taining and developing the oversea dependencies 
of England. Parliament threw itself heartily into 
this aim and passed measure after measure which 
was intended to establish a solidarity of interests 
by inducing private men to direct their energies 
into fields which were of importance for the nation 
and its dependencies considered as a whole. 

The landed interest was encouraged by the Corn 
Bounty Act to devote more attention to the raising 
of corn ; and during the eighteenth century agricul- 
tural improvement was being steadily pushed on, 
sometimes by sinking capital and reclaiming waste 
land, and sometimes by introducing new crops. 
The most important improvement, however, con- 
sisted in doing away with customary cultivation, 
and common pasturing on the waste, in favour of 
separate holdings, so that the soil could be well 



io6 Modern Social Problems [ch. 

worked, while the danger of its becoming exhausted 
was diminished. The outward and visible sign of this 
change being carried through was the enclosure of 
common fields and the common waste; and this 
again afforded conditions which were favourable to 
improved husbandry of every kind. Farming became 
a fashionable hobby, and the pioneers of improve- 
ment made rapid progress, though there was frequent 
complaint of easy going men who lagged behind. 

There was an immense increase in agricultural 
production and an addition to the food supply of 
the nation ; but this result was not secured without 
incidental loss ; the more enterprising and intelligent 
elements in the rural districts prospered, but there 
were many who could not adapt themselves to the 
new system. The most serious change was due to 
the fact that production on a large scale was specially 
remunerative in the eighteenth century, and that 
the small holders, like the small masters at a later 
date, were unable to hold their own. In this way 
the stepping stones by which thrifty and diligent 
men had been able to improve their positions were 
removed, and the agricultural labourer ceased to 
have the prospect he had formerly enjoyed of 
improving his position. In the actual process of 
enclosing, as well as in the improvements which it 
facilitated, there were often cases of hardship. But 



v] The Nation and its Dependencies 107 

on the other hand, there would have been serious 
loss to the country, if the course of agricultural 
improvement had been stayed, and no advance had 
been made in the methods of common cultivation. 
The landlords, as a class, allied themselves with the 
forces which made for the progress of the nation, 
and they shared personally in the increased pros- 
perity of the nation; they have not, however, 
habitually made their private gain their sole object, 
but have kept before them the importance of ordering 
their affairs and using their influence so as to promote 
the political power of the realm. 

The position of the monied men was very 
different; their national importance consisted, not 
so much in developing the resources of Great Britain 
itself, — though they greatly increased the production 
of mineral wealth, — as in increasing the influence 
of the country in distant lands, by pushing trade 
and investing capital in the plantations. They felt 
that they were engaging in work, which was of 
great national importance, at their own personal 
risk ; and they were jealous, under the circumstances, 
of landed men, who were themselves gainers by their 
promotion of a public interest. The landowners had 
a representation in parliament which seemed to 
them to be quite out of proportion to the sacrifices 



lo8 Modern Social Problems [ch. 

they made for the good of the country, especially 
when the funding system came into operation, and 
the monied man had lent so largely to the State 
for its necessities. They were anxious to obtain 
more power in the State, and were sometimes 
prepared, like the East India Company, to procure 
it by bribery and corruption, if they could not secure 
a fair representation of their interests in parHament. 
They insisted that their interests would be better 
attended to if they had increased poHtical power, 
while they came to recognise that the measures, 
which statesmen devised with a view to promote 
a national interest, were not always well adapted 
to the purpose; they thus paved the way aHke for 
the appeal for increased pohtical power, and for 
freedom from State interference. The monied men 
in the eighteenth century started the agitation for 
parliamentary reform and also used their influence 
in the direction of laissez faire. 

Meanwhile another influence was at work ; there 
were signs, before the close of the eighteenth century, 
of care on the part of parliament for the unrepre- 
sented. The tradition of the duty of members of 
the House of Commons, — to bring forward grievances 
for redress and to call attention to local interests, — 
was supplemented by a sense of duty towards 



v] Humanitarian Legislation 109 

those who were unable to speak for themselves 
and for whose benefit government could interfere, 
at least by putting down abuses. There were new 
efforts on the part of parHament to do something 
for the welfare of the people, and not merely for 
the material resources of the realm. A revived 
desire to provide, at public expense, for those who 
were incapacitated by sickness was shown in the 
new era of the foundation of hospitals which 
marked the reign of George II, and the duty of 
caring for human life was exemplified by the founders 
of the Royal Humane Society. Parliament was 
becoming something of a benevolent despot within 
the realm, when it legislated in regard to the treat- 
ment of apprentices, and put down the slavery of 
colliers in Scotland. Nor was this sense of responsi- 
bility confined to unrepresented classes within the 
realm; the agitation against the slave trade, and 
the changes in the administration of the Indian 
Empire, showed a new determination to exercise 
British influence with a view to the good of subject 
peoples. 

The Declaration of Independence and the formal 
severance of the American Colonies from the Mother 
Country was an event of great political importance 
and it marked the parting of the ways between two 



no Modern Social Problems [ch. 

branches of the Anglo-Saxon race; the special 
influence which England exercised on the States of 
the Union came to an end, henceforth French and 
subsequently German influence became as strong, 
if not stronger, than that of England. Americans 
have not shared in the extraordinary change in 
political ideas, which has occurred in Great Britain 
during the last century and a half. Americans have 
indeed retained much of the tradition of what was 
current in England in the earlier part of the 
eighteenth century, though they shook off ideas 
and sentiments which continued to be accepted 
and developed in Great Britain ; they came to rely 
on their own experience instead. The American 
Colonies could no longer be satisfied to be treated 
as the mere dependencies of a distant nation ; they 
did not trust their interests to the benevolent 
despotism of a parliament in which they had no 
representation, and they desired to be free to work 
out their own destiny in the country which they 
had won back from forest and wilderness. To 
sacrifice the share they might have in the power and 
influence of Great Britain seemed a small price to 
pay for independence. The British parliament has 
continued, however, to keep before the people of 
this country the importance of considering the 
realm, and its power and influence, as a whole ; the 



v] The Industrial Revolution iii 

lessons as to solidarity of interests which had been 
impressed on the landed and on the monied men 
have been diffused more generally among the people. 
By the lowering of the franchise a larger and larger 
proportion of the population has come to share in 
the power of forcing parliament to attend to their 
interests instead of being left to benevolent despotism 
of any kind. The responsibilities of power over 
subject peoples are more generally recognised than 
ever before, while the colonies are no longer treated 
as dependencies to be coerced, but as self-governing 
communities which may co-operate for the common 
good of the Empire as a whole. 

(iv) The Industrial Revolution and its 
effects in England. 

It remains for us to indicate some differences 
of experience within the country which have tended 
to increase the cleavage between Englishmen and 
Americans and to affect their attitude of mind 
towards modern problems. An extraordinary change 
was wrought in England by the age of invention, 
and the manner in which long estabhshed industrial 
life was broken up by the introduction of machinery. 
In a new country, like America, where manufacturing 
industry was little developed, there was no organised 
system to be broken up, and the age of invention 



112 Modern Social Problems [cH. 

did not cause a revolution, or make any great 
impression on the public mind. 

The difficulties of the organisation of economic 
activity, which arise sooner or later in a progressive 
society, had made themselves felt in England for 
generations, so far as agriculture was concerned; 
but there had been no similar difficulty in regard 
to manufacture, because there had been so little 
progress in the industrial arts. New industries had 
been planted, and old manufactures were conducted 
on a larger scale with more division of labour; but 
there was little change in the processes themselves, 
until the age of invention when both the iron and 
the textile trades were revolutionised. The effect 
on the wealth of the country was extraordinary, 
in the enormous increase of material prosperity; 
but the effect of the revolution on the people engaged 
in manufacture was so disastrous that the public 
conscience was awakened. The public mind was 
gradually forced to recognise that the monied man 
must not be content to pursue his business with a 
view to his own private gain, but that the manner 
in which he conducted it was a matter of concern to 
the public. The public interest came to be seen in a 
new light, and not to be viewed merely in its bearing 
on the political power and influence of the realm, 
but also with regard to the condition of human lives 



v] Modern Inventions 113 

within the country. The increase of material goods 
and the attainment of industrial supremacy were 
not the greatest gain which has come to England 
from the age of invention ; it was the occasion when 
she learned the lesson that the mere pursuit of 
private interest in matters of business gives rise to 
terrible inhumanities, and that it is necessary, not 
only for landed but for monied men, to keep public 
considerations in view, as well as pecuniary gain, 
in the conduct of business. 

Modern inventions, as they are introduced 
throughout the world, cannot fail to make a change 
in the position of workmen trained in old methods. 
The relative importance of the individual workman, 
as compared with the machinery and the organising 
power which are supplied by the capitalist, has 
diminished considerably. The product is far greater, 
but the labourer's proportionate share in the process 
of production is not so large as it was formerly. 
This problem has to be faced in all the countries 
which have been or are being affected by the intro- 
duction of modern mechanism and modern methods 
of organisation. But in no land has the effect of 
these inventions on the position of the workmen 
been more severely felt than in Britain. This was 
the first country in which the old industrial organisa- 
tion was undermined, and no one could foresee or 

C. 8 



114 Modern Social Problems [cH. 

attempt to guard against the results; and owing 
to the special circumstances of the time the suffering 
caused by the Industrial Revolution was widespread 
and intense. 



The staple industry in England, the manufacture 
of drapery, had been, for the most part, carried on 
as a by-occupation, or subsidiary industry, by those 
who were also engaged in farming on a small scale. 
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when 
the manufacturing activities of the country were 
being concentrated in factory towns where water 
power was available, the opportunity of making a 
good living, by this combination of employments, 
was withdrawn from the men who resided with 
their families in rural districts. So long as they 
could combine farming with manufacturing they 
had been comfortably off ; but as soon as the oppor- 
tunities of employment at home in manufacturing 
were withdrawn, they were unable to make a living 
on farm employment alone. And this deficit occurred 
in their family budgets at the very time when EngHsh 
agriculture itself was being conducted in difficult 
conditions. Up to 1770, England had been a wheat 
exporting country. The demand from abroad for 
wheat rendered it possible for the grower to depend 
on getting a remunerative price for his crop whether 



V] Clothiers and Farmers 115 

it was large or small. Twenty years later, after 
1790, England ceased to be able to support her 
increased population with the products of her own 
soil, and became a corn importing country; there 
were, in consequence, great fluctuations in the price 
of corn. From the consumer's point of view, the 
result was serious, and attempts were made for 
several successive years to stimulate the import of 
corn, until it was urged that the wiser pohcy would 
be to endeavour to stimulate the home production 
of corn so that we might once more rely for susten- 
ance on our internal resources. Under both these 
schemes the fluctuations of price continued. In a 
plentiful year the crop might be unremunerative 
if prices fell, while the effects in a bad year would 
also be a strain on the resources of a farmer. It 
was not practical, in the conditions of existing agri- 
culture, to give a substantial increase of wages 
which should make up in the family budget for the 
loss of earnings in spinning and weaving; and the 
disastrous experiment was tried of tiding over the 
period of strain by making allowances to supplement 
the wages of rural labourers. Without attempting 
to carry out the matter in further detail, we 
can see that at the close of the eighteenth 
century and the beginning of the nineteenth, it 
was impossible for the small farmer or labourer 

8—2 



Ii6 Modern Social Problems [CH. 

who was employed on the land to make a good 
living. 

The introduction of machinery caused a serious 
depression among those engaged in agriculture; 
and this reacted most disastrously on those who 
were employed in manufacturing. If they had had 
a prospect of making a living on a farm, the weavers, 
who were dissatisfied with the conditions of employ- 
ment in manufacturing, could have turned their 
attention to the prospects of improving their position 
by settling on the land. In England at the be- 
ginning of the nineteenth century the artisan had no 
such alternative. He has had to stick to his trade 
or to be wholly idle. During the first quarter of 
the nineteenth century, the competition of capi- 
talists and the fluctuations of trade drove down the 
wages of factory labour to a very low level, and 
there was no standard set, by the possibilities of 
earning a living from the soil, which served as a barrier 
to prevent wages from falling to starvation rates. 
The starvation rates of wages were not only an evil 
in themselves, but they were an obstacle to the 
introduction of improved conditions of work. The 
manufacturers held that the low money wages were 
the cause of all the suffering of the hands, and 
protested that the shortening of hours would 



v] State Supervision 117 

probably do more harm than good. But the eyes 
of the pubHc had been opened, and they insisted 
that in the general interest of the country humani- 
tarian considerations should be directly taken into 
account in the organisation of industry. 

Elizabeth had brought home their responsibilities 
to the landed interest, by creating administrative 
machinery for economic purposes; and the nine- 
teenth century saw the creation of new machinery 
for humanitarian objects. This could hardly have 
been attempted but for the fact that there had been 
an extraordinary improvement in administration of 
every kind. At the beginning of the nineteenth 
century, officialism was so tedious and so ineffective 
that no one would willingly see any duty taken 
over by an incompetent government department. 
But experience of the greatly increased departmental 
activities, which came into being during the nine- 
teenth century, has shown that the fear of officialism 
may be exaggerated. There is now diligent super- 
vision by the State over every department of industry, 
and this gives the opportunity for devising better 
measures to correct abuses, while the most careless 
employer is kept awake to a sense of his responsi- 
bilities. In the present day, competition is very 
keen, and the margin of profit on which an employer 
can count is very small. Business is organised on 



ii8 Modern Social Problems [ch. 

a large scale, and the master or managing director 
has less personal knowledge of his employees and 
less freedom for personal action, than he had in 
the days of domestic industry. In the past monied 
men have often been very public spirited in the 
way they spent their money, but public considera- 
tions have not seemed to affect their methods of 
making it. But the employer is far more conscious 
now of the necessity of trying to rise to his responsi- 
bilities. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
there were some employers, like Sir Robert Peel, 
who were thoroughly sympathetic with those they 
employed and eager to promote their welfare. But 
the general standard was different, for the public 
did not expect the employer to take much account 
of the social condition or welfare of factory hands. 
It was held that the capitalist had done his duty 
to the community by undertaking the risks of enter- 
prise so as to increase national wealth. But no one 
expected him to recognise more than the cash 
nexus in his dealings with his workmen. During 
the last hundred years public expectations have 
entirely changed, and no capitalist can ignore them 
even if he desired to do so. The provision which 
is made, when new coalfields are opened up, for 
the comfort of miners by the directors of public 
companies, who are responsible to the shareholders. 



v] Organised Labour 119 

compares very favourably with the best that was 
done by generous men at the beginning of the 
nineteenth century. Before the middle of the nine- 
teenth century the public conscience was thoroughly 
roused as to the evils of the factory system, and the 
mischief that was being done to national hfe by 
the over-working of women and children; and the 
capitalists could no longer disclaim responsibility 
for their dependents. The gathering of crowds of 
employees in factories brought to light evils that 
had probably been going on unheeded in the domestic 
system, and so rendered it possible to introduce 
effective supervision. The immense development of 
the administrative work of the State, in taking account 
of the conditions of labourers and constantly trying 
to improve them, has been a great achievement. 

Organised labour in Britain is no longer compelled 
to accept what the beneficence of other classes 
affords, but is powerful enough to engage for itself 
in a struggle to maintain and improve the standard 
of life. When the natural standard, which is given 
by the conditions of employment in the land, was 
broken down, the Trade Unionists set themselves 
to establish and maintain an artificial standard by 
means of combination among themselves. The 
methods they have adopted have sometimes brought 
unfair pressure on independent labourers; and it 



120 Modern Social Problems [CH. 

is possible to attach exaggerated importance to the 
object they have in view. There are grounds for 
saying that the landed interest and the monied 
interest have in turn fallen into the error of regarding 
the interest of their class as typical of that of the 
community and attending to it exclusively; and 
Trade Unionists are in danger of forgetting that the 
prosperity of the community, in the long run and 
on the whole, must be kept in view as well as the 
interests of labour in the present. 

(v) The awakening of the British conscience. 

Englishmen of all classes and of all political 
parties, at the opening of the twentieth century, 
seem to have awakened to the defects in modern 
society. They do not share the optimism of the 
Early Victorian times, when it seemed that if a 
few simple changes were effected, we should enter 
on a sort of millennium. We look back on the age 
of invention and are impressed by the enormous 
changes which have been brought about in the 
command of man over nature, while we cannot but 
acknowledge that comparatively little has been 
achieved in improving the conditions of individual 
human lives. But yet there is a new hope of 
effecting a remedy. Much has been accomplished 
by State intervention in regard to factories and 



v] Laissez faire I2l 

workshops and mines, and the hygienic conditions 
of town and country Hfe, and there is a widely 
diffused feehng that the community has the power, 
if it would only take the trouble, to put down the 
most obvious evils in modern society, and that there 
is a duty to make the attempt. So far there is a 
general agreement, even among those who differ 
most widely as to the remedies which it is worth 
while to try. The pubhc conscience has been 
aroused, and there is a widespread sense of duty 
to do more by State action for the welfare of the 
people. 

This awakening of the public conscience in regard 
to duty has involved the discarding of opinions 
which were generally accepted during the nineteenth 
century. It no longer seems sufi&cient to measure 
national welfare in pecuniary terms which serve if 
we are only thinking of material wealth; and it 
is no longer possible to hold that the State fulfils 
its function if it maintains law and order, and 
leaves private individuals free to pursue their own 
interests as actively as possible. No one now relies 
on the regenerative effect of crude self-interest ; the 
doctrine of laissez faire has been abandoned in one 
department after another; and those who still 
cling to it assume, on the part of individual citizens, 
a high development of the altruistic habit of 



122 Modern Social Problems [ch. 

regarding the future welfare of this country as a 
personal interest of their own. 

The doctrine of laissez faire was so plausible and 
there was so much to be said in its favour a century 
ago that it secured a very firm hold upon the public 
mind. It seemed that it was unnecessary for the 
government to cultivate the virtues of a benevolent 
despot, and that it ought to stand aside while private 
men pursued their own interests. Reformers, political 
and economic, felt how much material progress had 
been hampered in the past by the unwise inter- 
ference of authority or by the power of vested 
interests ; and they believed that the greatest good 
of the community can be best attained by giving 
the greatest freedom to individuals and by reducing 
the activities of the State within the narrowest 
possible Hmits. This view was elaborated later by 
Herbert Spencer; and it seems almost a truism to 
say that as, at any given moment, the State consists 
of certain individuals, the aggregate of individual 
interests must be identical with the interests of the 
State as a whole. It has been urged that the State, 
apart from the individuals which compose it, is 
a mere nonentity, that each individual is the best 
judge of his own interest, and that by giving free 
play for the pursuit of individual interests, the 
interest of the whole will be best secured. The 



v] The Mechanism of Society 123 

State has thus been regarded as a mere policeman 
whose business it is to safeguard the pursuit of 
private interests, and the conception of duty to 
the State, or of any obHgation to serve the State, 
seems to fall into the background. On this view 
social salvation may be hoped for as emerging from 
the free play of interests ; and the success of many 
experiments in the associating of individuals for the 
pursuit of common interests, such as co-operation 
and co-partnership, seems to show how far this 
principle will carry us in a right direction and how 
much we may hope from it. 

The police theory of the State is not only plausible 
but it has had powerful support from outside. It 
is approved by economists who have found it con- 
venient, for the purpose of examining the production 
and distribution of wealth, to regard society as a 
mechanism; and this is undoubtedly convenient as 
a means of stating economic problems at any given 
time, and examining the play of economic forces 
in detail. The conception of a mechanism is appro- 
priate to progressive societies, for short periods and 
for particular places, but it is not to be relied upon 
for long periods or as supplying principles from which 
practical guidance can be derived. It is an inadequate 
conception, for a progressive society is not a mere 



124 Modern Social Problems [cH. 

mechanism^, it lives and grows ; its advance cannot 
be gauged by merely mechanical tests. A civilised 
society, like any other living organism, is continually 
absorbing and assimilating fresh elements and dis- 
carding what is worn out. There are many symptoms 
by which we can note the existence of disease or judge 
of healthy vitality in a community, but there is 
no definite standard by which we can measure its 
progress accurately in the past, nor can we lay down 
cut and dried formulae to secure that progress in 
the future shall be made on the best possible lines. 
Economists who are content to consider society 
as a mechanism and to be satisfied with a police 
state, which gives free play for individual interests, 
neglect the element of time. In a progressive 
society the interests, of which the aggregate of 
individuals at the present time are conscious, are 
not the same as the aggregate interests of the 
persons who will form the community in the future. 
There must be the sacrifice of the interests of those 
who are concerned in maintaining the conditions of 
the present, if there is to be a change for the better 



1 The unscientific character of much of the current treat- 
ment of economic problems has been frequently exposed. 
Compare my British Association paper in Credit Industry and 
the War, edited by Prof. Kirkaldy, p. 256; see also my 
article in the Economic Review, ii. 25, and my letter in reply 
to Prof. Marshall, Academy, I Oct. 1892. 



v] Neglect of public duties 125 

in the future. Where private interests have free 
play there is a danger of the ruthless sacrifice of 
individuals to the exigencies of the progress of 
society and it is only by the cultivation of a sense 
of duty, towards the less energetic and progressive 
members of society, that the incidental evils can be 
reduced to a minimum and the welfare of society in 
the future attained with the minimum of incidental 
loss in the present. The view of the State as merely 
concerned in matters of police is not adequate even 
as regards the economic welfare of the community. 

This theory of the State has also found supporters 
from the religious side, in those who have concen- 
trated attention on private and personal duty and 
have minimised the duties of citizenship. The 
Quakers have taken this point of view exclusively, 
they have felt it right to abstain from public office 
and to take no part in the banishment of crime by 
methods which are not open to the private indi- 
vidual ; nor do they acknowledge a duty to the State 
of taking up arms in the defence of the realm. 
This disparagement of the State^ as an earthly 

1 The claim of the Quakers that the cultivation of private 
duty has proved sufficient to secure public benefits is hardly- 
borne out in the cases which are most commonly alleged. 

The progress of the Anti-Slavery Movement within the 
Quaker body was exceedingly slow, whereas rapid progress 
was effected when Clarkson and Wilberforce made it a matter 



126 Modern Social Problems [ch. 

authority is inconsistent with any sense of rehgious 
duty in pubHc affairs. If the function of rehgion 
is confined to that of personal hfe there can be no 
religious inspiration or guidance in the doing of 
public duties and secular affairs are inevitably left 
to the play of selfish interests. 

In spite of its plausibility and of the support 
which it appears to receive from economic experts 
and men who are deeply in earnest about religion, 
the political theory, which reduces the State to the 
exercise of police functions, and would give free 
play to private interests, gives an inadequate stand- 
point for dealing with the problems of modern 
society. It is essential that there should not only 
be the play of interests, but the cultivation of duty, 
and it is here that a new field opens up for political 
education. Democracy can only flourish if the 
citizens are led to think of the welfare of the com- 
munity as a whole in all their public duties and in 
all the activities in which they engage. The man 
who is content to use his power and influence for 
the prosecution of his own interests, and for 
endeavouring to get as much as he can out of the 

of Parliamentary agitation. The peace with the Indians 
which Pennsylvania enjoyed was not to be wholly ascribed 
to the pacifist attitude of Penn. Parkman, Conspiracy of 
Pontiac, i. 80, 85. 



v] Private Interests 127 

State, is not dignified by the possession of the powers 
of citizenship. To be worthy of his position as a 
free citizen he must cultivate the effort to do what 
he can to serve the pubhc, and cultivate a sense of 
duty to the community as a whole. 

The opinion that the function of the State is 
rightly limited to the maintenance of law and order 
so that private interests can have free play, appears 
to have even a firmer hold on American minds than 
it has among Englishmen, though of course an 
occasional protest is heard. Mr J. J. Chapman 
argues that though "It is thought that the peculiar 
merit of democracy lies in this ; that it gives every 
man a chance to pursue his own ends. The reverse 
is true. The merit lies in the assumption imposed 
upon every man that he shall serve his fellow men. 
...The concentration of every man on his own 
interest has been the danger and not the safety of 
democracy ; for democracy contemplates that every 
man shall think first of the State and next of himself. 
This is its only justification. In so far as it is operated 
by men who are thinking first of their own interests 
and then of the State, its operation is distorted^." 
But Mr Chapman is exceptional and can hardly be 
regarded as a typical American. JournaHsts who 
^ Causes and Consequences, 121. 



128 Modern Social Problems [ch. 

cater for the ordinary newspaper reader seem to be 
satisfied with the view that democratic institutions 
are themselves a boon, without reaUsing the import- 
ance of using them so that they shall be educative 
in the duties of citizenship. 

The dominance in America of the view that the 
State is only concerned in giving free play to indi- 
viduals is easily accounted for, when we remember 
how sparsely the old tradition of loyalty was trans- 
planted, and how difficult it was to form anew a 
conception of a nation for which sacrifices should be 
made. The elements of English society which were 
by position and trading most habituated to public 
spirit did not as a rule emigrate in large numbers 
to the plantations. The landed gentry were con- 
scious of the responsibility to the Crown for the 
order which they maintained in their own locality; 
they looked to the Crown as the source of the honours 
to which they aspired, and thus their conduct was 
inspired by a sense of duty to the whole in the 
management of their private affairs; but though 
there were many cadets of county families who 
found their way to Virginia^, this influence was not 

1 Mr Ingle observes of county government in Virginia 
"The dominant idea was gradation of power from the Governor 
downward, not upward from the people," Local Institutions in 
Virginia, Johns Hopkins Political Studies, Series iii, 97. 



V] Police Theory of the State 129 

prominent in other parts of the country. The 
tradition that office was an honour was maintained 
in the Old Dominion, and Washington had a high 
ideal of the position of those who were called to 
public office. But throughout the country generally, 
where private and local interests were dominant, 
office was too often regarded as a burden, and a man 
with important affairs of his own was inclined to 
shirk it if he could ; nor did the English townsmen, 
who were accustomed to subordinate their personal 
successes to the good of the community and were 
examples of civic or national patriotism, contribute 
largely to the population of the colonies. They 
were inclined to look on the colonies as a field for 
the investment of their capital; and though they 
were prepared to send factors to do their business, 
they had little sense of developing civiUsed life 
in a new world ; indeed their pubUc spirit, such as 
it was, was repellant to the Americans. The mer- 
chants of the East India Company, and others, 
regarded their commercial undertakings as sub- 
ordinate to the prosperity of Great Britain, but 
the colonist was irritated by efforts to treat the 
territory in which he lived as merely a subordinate 
part of an Empire in ruling which he had no share, 
and it was long before any other conception of the 
State as a whole grew to be so definite as to exercise 
c. 9 



130 Modern Social Problems [CH. 

a conscious influence in the management of affairs. 
It was difficult for the citizen of a vast country to 
reahse its soHdarity or to feel that the nation had 
a claim to make and guidance to give in regard to 
his own personal conduct of affairs. It was not until 
the conclusion of the Great Civil War that the various 
States were welded together so closely that Americans 
became fully conscious not only of their tie to their 
own State, but of their citizenship in one great 
nation. 

American civilisation has grown up from the 
federation of small units; it has, as a matter of 
fact, illustrated the ideas of civil government which 
formed part of the doctrine of Locke ; though there 
was no original contract, the members of each town- 
ship were associated together for the preservation 
of their own interests. It was the recognition of the 
larger and larger interests which they had in common 
that led to the formation of other organs of govern- 
ment. The supremacy of private interest as that 
for the promotion of which government exists, has 
dominated the whole development, and is deeply 
ingrained in the political Hfe of the country. The 
colonists failed to carry with them the English 
sense of public spirit ; and circumstances during the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave little 



v] The awakening of public conscience 131 

opportunity for the development of a public spirit 
of their own. 

Nor did the experience of Americans make them 
realise the necessity of supplementing the action 
of private interests by greater care for the public; 
partly owing to the wide extent of country, partly 
to the independence of each settler, there was 
neither opportunity nor occasion to provide the 
hospitals and other public institutions which were 
being founded during the eighteenth century in 
England for the preservation and protection of 
human life. In particular, America was late in 
developing her industrial activities; there were 
citizens like Jefferson, who thought that demo- 
cratic ideals could be best maintained by a rural 
population. Those who introduced manufactures 
preferred modern methods of organisation, and there 
was no call for any of the American States to inter- 
fere in favour of apprentices ; the Americans had no 
experience, such as that which called forth the agita- 
tion of Lord Shaftesbury and other philanthropists, 
and led to the restriction of industrial capitalists. 

But times have changed. America has long 
since developed a great industrial life, and some 
of its characteristic evils have appeared. Vigorous 
efforts have been made in many quarters by philan- 
thropic associations, to promote the welfare of 

9—2 



132 Modern Social Problems [CH. V 

particular classes in one part or another of the 
United States. During the last decade there has 
been some successful agitation for legislation in 
particular cases; but after all America is a young 
country, great areas of her territory are imper- 
fectly developed, and she may have to go through 
experience which is similar to that of England during 
the Industrial Revolution. The day seems not to 
be very far distant when there will no longer be 
land available for the labourer, with a minimum of 
capital, to settle and produce what is requisite for 
his own subsistence. When the land is so fully 
occupied that America becomes partly dependent 
for food from abroad, a crisis may arise similar to 
that which occurred in England at the beginning 
of last century, and the pressure on the industrial 
population is likely to become more severe. It 
seems not improbable, however, that before that 
day arrives the public conscience may be aroused 
in America as it has been in England, to the necessity 
of bringing public considerations habitually to bear 
on the play of private interests, and of training 
monied men to take more account of their social 
responsibilities, not only in the way in which they 
spend their money, but in the methods by which 
they make it. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF NATIONAL 
POWER AND INFLUENCE! 

(i) The tradition of Insular Policy. 

It is very interesting to notice persistence of 
type, and to see how Americans maintain habits of 
thought that betray their EngHsh ancestry. Ameri- 
can speech has preserved many phrases and idioms 
that have dropped out of use in Great Britain; 
and something similar has occurred in the poHtical 
sphere, where Americans have retained a point of 
view which Britons generally speaking have come 
to discard. America takes her stand firmly on the 
wisdom of the views she has inherited, as to the 
desirability of keeping clear from entanglement 
with other peoples and their affairs, in the hope of 
being able to pursue a path of peaceful prosperity 
uninterruptedly. 

This had been the generally accepted policy of 

1 Empire Club, Columbia University, New York. 



134 Responsibilities of National Power [cH. 

England for centuries; it dates as far back as the 
union of the two Houses under Henry VII, who 
laid the foundations for the peaceful union of 
England and Scotland under one Crown. Henry VII 
kept aloof from quarrels abroad, and raised the 
Crown to a position of unexampled power within 
the realm; and he hoped that, by developing the 
resources and power of the country, he might be 
free to exercise a determining influence in the 
struggles between rival European powers. Wolsey 
endeavoured to carry on the same policy; to 
Elizabeth it was a matter of vital importance that 
the realm should not be absorbed either by France 
or Spain. She has become a popular heroine chiefly 
because of her success in playing off the catholic 
powers against one another; and this negative 
attitude, while not calculated to rouse enthusiasm, 
has won the approval of all parties in turn. The 
EngHsh public disliked the project of a Spanish 
marriage, and King James's efforts to influence 
continental affairs by means of this alliance ; Whigs 
resented Charles H's close connection with France, 
as much as the Tories distrusted the Hanoverian 
connection and the manner in which England came 
to be concerned in continental questions; while 
Walpole was eager to maintain the peace policy 
at all costs. Generations of Englishmen had been 



vi] The tradition of Insular Policy 135 

bred and born with the view that it was the best 
poHcy for an island realm to develop her own 
resources and to leave other peoples alone; and 
the American colonists were naturally inclined to 
apply this doctrine to their own case, especially 
after the removal of the danger of attack from 
the French in Canada and the Ohio Valley. Many 
of the colonists felt that they had no longer any 
direct interest in the struggle between Great Britain 
and France; they saw no reason why they should 
be dragged into a conflict of European nations in 
which they had no immediate concern, and they 
refused to allow the development of their own 
country to be controlled in the interests of the 
political necessities of Great Britain. 

Although they were engaged time after time, 
during the Middle Ages, in supporting the claims 
of kings to an extension of their territories, there 
was a deep feeling among Englishmen that they 
should only engage in conflicts in self-defence, but 
this implied that England should make the most 
of her insular position and obtain the command of 
the sea. The Danish invasions had called forth 
maritime activity under King Alfred; and the 
command of the seas became a cardinal point in 
the Plantagenet policy of building up a commercial 



136 Responsibilities of National Power [cH. 

Empire in which Gascony, Flanders and England 
should co-operate to promote the prosperity of the 
territories which were ruled by English Kings. 
The Lihel of English Policy is the earliest commercial 
tract written in English, and it insists on the import- 
ance of keeping the narrow seas : an effective mari- 
time force was necessary, not only to protect 
commerce, but to defend the coasts from the raids 
of enemies. Piracy was practised as a by-occupation 
by many shipmen when trade was dull, and the 
whole line of the coast in the fifteenth century was 
exposed to frequent depredations. The necessity 
for policing the seas and defending the coasts 
continued to be felt in the seventeenth century, 
when Baltimore, in Ireland, was devastated by 
Algerian pirates; and Charles I endeavoured by 
means of ship-money to raise a fleet which should 
give effective protection to the coast and to English 
commerce in the Mediterranean. 

At the time of the discovery of the New World 
and the Reformation, the English determination 
to secure naval superiority took a new form ; when 
she was threatened with attack, counter attacks and 
aggression became necessary as a means of self- 
defence. England found that her independence and 
her institutions were menaced by Spain, while the 
whole world appeared to be given over to a type 



vi] The tradition of Insular Policy 137 

of civilisation which she detested. England, by 
her success in destroying the Spanish Armada, not 
only secured her own independence, but succeeded 
in obtaining a footing as a world-power. EngHshmen 
in the EHzabethan time seem to have gone far 
beyond Elizabeth personally in their aims and 
ambitions; they awakened to a sense of mission 
to protect a portion of the newly discovered countries 
from being exploited by Spain and absorbed in the 
Spanish system. They began to aim at the sove- 
reignty of the sea, not merely for the sake of defence 
or dynastic ambition, but as the means of fulfilling 
the destiny of the English people. 

The success of France, in becoming the dominant 
influence in Europe and establishing far-reaching 
connections both in India and in America, gave 
English policy a new direction, but did not alter 
its fundamental character. The main object was 
that of maintaining a successful rivalry with a 
great antagonist. All through the eighteenth century 
a succession of wars was waged for this purpose, 
and it affected all national activities in time of peace 
as well. Other considerations were subordinated 
to that of building up national power in the hope 
of establishing effective superiority over France, as 
a nation with large colonial possessions and great 
prestige. Many regulations were made with this 



138 Responsibilities of National Power [CH. 

object in regard to the resources of Great Britain, 
and the schemes which were laid down for colonial 
development were all devised with the view of 
making the resources of the colonies subservient to 
the pohtical power of the mother country. It was 
by the command of the sea that Britain was able 
to foil her French antagonists both in India and in 
Canada; naval superiority continued to be an 
essential condition for attaining political power, till 
it was firmly established at Trafalgar. 

The conquest of Canada gave the English 
colonies on the Atlantic coast a new sense of security. 
They were free from any possibility of maritime 
attack, and the traditional English policy of main- 
taining command at sea ceased to appeal to them. 
Their eyes were turned to expansion by land and 
to controlling the hinterland; their maritime 
interests were merely commercial, and did not 
involve such political questions as that of national 
security. Since the Declaration of Independence 
Americans have carried on the great work of planting 
the interior and the frontier has gradually been 
rolled farther and farther back^. The waves of 
settlement from the East and from the West have 

1 F. J. Turner, Report of American Historical Association, 
1893, HI. 199. 



vi] The tradition of Insular Policy 139 

at last met; but America has been so much con- 
cerned with internal development that there has 
been comparatively little occasion to modify her 
views about foreign relationships; she could con- 
tinue, with some brief exceptions, to be habitually 
indifferent in regard to sea power. There is an 
extraordinary unanimity throughout the States as 
to the desirability of holding aloof from foreign 
entanglements of any kind; this rests on an in- 
herited tradition and is an accepted maxim with all 
parties. The policy of aloofness or isolation which 
was developed in an island realm has proved appro- 
priate to a people who inhabit a country so widely 
separated from the Old World. 

(ii) The claim to arbitrate. 

This sense of detachment has led Americans to 
cherish the national ambition of being recognised as 
a dispassionate mediator in the disputes of other 
nations. As England in Tudor times seemed to be 
cut out for the position of the tongue of the balance, 
when opposing claims are being weighed, so America 
now hopes to exercise a preponderating influence 
in maintaining peace and deciding disputes through- 
out the world. The attempt to maintain a negative 
policy and avoid entanglements seems to be con- 
sistent with the far-reaching ambition, which is 



140 Responsibilities of National Power [CH» 

cherished by Dr Wilson. "Look abroad," he says^, 
*'upon the troubled world. Only America is at 
peace among all the great powers of the world. 
Only America is saving her power for her own people. 
Only America is using her great character, her 
great strength and her great interest for peace and 
prosperity. Do you not think it likely that the 
world will at some time turn to America and say, 
' You were right and we were wrong ; you kept your 
heads, we lost ours, now in your self-possession, 
coolness and strength may we not turn to you for 
counsel and assistance ? ' May we not look forward 
to the time when we shall be called blessed among 
the nations and the servants of mankind ? " But 
even though America is a great land of plenty it is 
doubtful if she is fitted to be a successful arbiter; 
an arbiter is certainly at an advantage if he possesses 
the power of enforcing his decision, as the Pope 
could do by means of spiritual censures, and as the 
English monarchy could attempt by throwing the 
weight of its influence on one or other of two sides. 

It is even more important that an arbiter should 

be able to appreciate the rival claims which are 

brought before him and to understand the issues 

at stake. Many Englishmen would be unwilling to 

^ Speech at Indianapolis, 8 Jan. 1915. 



Vi] The claim to arbitrate 141 

accept the arbitration of the United States, because 
the experience of Americans has been so exceptional 
that there is a danger that they would not fully 
comprehend a deHcate situation, (i) Americans 
have been able to Hve in practical security from 
attack, and to dispense with armaments, as they 
are understood in the modern world: there may 
be a strike of trolleymen in Cleveland, or of miners 
in Idaho, that the ordinary poHce are unable to 
cope with, and where it is necessary to bring in the 
miUtary to secure law and order ; but on the whole 
the maintenance of an army and navy seems 
unnecessary; and if a nation indulges in it, that 
nation seems to Americans to be under the suspicion 
of contemplating aggression on its neighbours. But 
other peoples may find it necessary to secure them- 
selves against attack by land or sea, and the main- 
tenance of armaments is not in itself a proof of 
hostile intentions. (2) Americans have been satis- 
fied so far with the conception of the State as merely 
responsible for maintaining law and order, and have 
attached supreme importance to the activities of 
private individuals ; they are incHned to identify 
the aggregate of private interests with the interest 
of the state. Private persons can be compen- 
sated pecuniarily for any wrong done them, and 
hence it seems that arbitration could always be 



142 Responsibilities of National Power [CH. 

resorted to, so as to settle the compensation due 
to private persons. The very conception of poHtical 
claims and ambitions, such as the security of the 
realm, which cannot be compromised, and in regard 
to which no compensation is possible, lies beyond 
the ordinary American range of thought. But 
an arbiter ought to take account of communities 
as a whole, not merely of the persons of which they 
are composed; and questions may arise which are 
intimately associated with national life where the 
analogy of disputes that are brought into civil 
courts fails us altogether. 

But apart from these general considerations, 
Americans are incHned to assume that the British 
Empire now is identical in its aims and objects with 
the British rule to which their forefathers submitted 
before the War of Independence. They have for- 
gotten nothing of their grievances, and they fail to 
realise how much Englishmen have learned in the 
time that has intervened. 

(iii) The British Empire in the 
Twentieth Century, 

As the fall of Quebec set the American colonists 
free from any fear of external attack by land or 
sea, so the victory of Trafalgar set Englishmen 
free from any fear of the rivalry of France as a 



Vi] Exploiting the Colonies 143 

maritime power. It was the death blow of the old 
colonial system which had prized the colonies 
because of the political strength which could be 
derived from them. The mother country regarded 
these distant territories as areas from which addi- 
tional resources might be drawn for the maintenance 
of the maritime power of the realm. The most 
complete proof of the abandonment of this view 
Hes in the fact that the mother country no longer 
attempts to control the economic Hfe of the oversea 
dominions, but leaves them free to develop along 
the lines which they find most appropriate for them- 
selves. At the present time the colonists seem to 
have reason to fear that if the hegemony of the 
world passed to Germany, the economic conditions 
of distant lands would be forced to become sub- 
servient to the supremacy of German industry. 

When the political object of securing economic 
control of the colonies was allowed to drop out of 
sight, the voices of those, who argued that the 
possession of oversea dominions was a mere vanity 
and a useless extravagance, began to be exerted 
more vigorously. From the eighteenth century 
onwards there were some Englishmen who looked 
on the colonies with jealousy; it was a matter of 
common remark that Spain had been weakened by 



144 Responsibilities of National Power [CH. 

the effort to develop a colonial empire, and fears 
were expressed lest, in planting America, England 
should be drained of money, and of men who could 
be usefully employed at home. In the eighteenth 
century Dr Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, set 
the fashion of treating the retention of the colonies 
as a mere question of profit and loss; and demon- 
strated that the political responsibilities they entailed 
were so costly that it was absurd to engage in 
colonisation at all. Sir John Sinclair gave vehement 
expression to this view^: "The whole expenses we 
have been put to, in consequence of our possessing 
colonies on the Continent of North America, may 
be estimated at forty millions, in addition to the 
charges of at least two wars, which cost us above 
240 millions more, and which were entered into 
principally on their account. 

*'It is the more necessary to bring forward 
enquiries into this branch of our expenditure, as 
the rage for colonisation has not as yet been driven 
from the councils of this country. We have lost 
New England; but a New Wales has since started 
up. How many miUions it may cost may be the 
subject of the calculations of succeeding financiers 
a century hence, unless by the exertions of some 

1 History of the Public Revenue of the British Empire, 
3rd edition, 11. loi. 



Vl] Territorial Aggrandisement 145 

able statesman that source of future waste and 
extravagance is prevented/' Distant territories came 
to be looked upon in relation to commerce, and so 
far as commerce was concerned the question of 
allegiance seemed to make very little difference. 
Trade with the United States had flourished and 
increased since the Declaration of Independence, 
and commercial men in Great Britain were opposed 
to territorial expansion as inconsistent with the 
interests of the country. They beheved that, along 
whatever lines the colonists found it most convenient 
to develop the territory, their^ prosperity was sure 
to react favourably on the mother country, without 
any effort on her part. 

From the point of view of the trader, any attempt 
at fresh territorial aggrandisement was regarded as 
a costly blunder. There had always been men who 
felt that oversea possessions involved us in heavy 
charges for their defence, and who were anxious 
not to add to that burden. Cromwell would 
apparently have been ready to cede the interests 
of England in North America to the Dutch, though 
he desired to strengthen the English connection with 
the West Indies ; time after time English statesmen 
have shown themselves reluctant to add to our 
possessions. This was particularly noticeable at 
the close of the Seven Years' War, when England 

c. 10 



146 Responsibilities of National Power [ch. 

accepted terms of peace which were most disap- 
pointing to those who carried through the great 
achievements of the war. Tangier, Mexico, Cuba, 
Manilla, Corsica, Buenos Ayres, Cape of Good Hope, 
Java and the Ionian Islands are places which Great 
Britain has abandoned of her own accord^; and 
after the Napoleonic War it came to be generally 
recognised that territorial aggrandisement had 
ceased to be to the interest of a maritime empire, 
though it continues to be an important aim for 
an empire, such as Great Britain once was and 
Germany still is, whose resources are based on the 
possession of lands and not on traded 

Since the middle of the nineteenth century there 
has been a reaction in Britain, and a feeling has arisen 

1 W. F. Lord, Lost Possessions of England. 

2 Herr Ortel, the well known Agrarian deputy, writes, 
''We must as soon as possible win and utilize as much new 
land as will enable German agriculture to cover without 
difficulty the whole requirements of the home population. 
If the land within the frontiers of the Empire does not suffice, 
one must look to the acquisition, at the conclusion of peace, 
of fresh land beyond the frontier. We consider it not only 
premature but unwise to go into details about eventual 
acquisitions of territory. But it is not too soon to insist that 
in any such acquisitions of territory we must keep steadily 
in view the aim of acquiring new land for agriculture as well 
as for other purposes. This is in the interest not only of 
agriculture but of the whole population and of Germany's 
security for the future." Times, 14 January, 1915. 



vi] Maritime Empire 147 

that the policy of a country cannot be dictated by 
merely pecuniary interests. New political reasons 
have arisen for maintaining superiority at sea; 
Great Britain's prosperity is no longer based on 
the "solid basis of land" when territorial expan- 
sion was reasonable, but on ''the fluctuating basis, 
trade^/* She is no longer able to raise a corn 
supply that suffices for her population and it is 
important for the country as a whole to protect 
the routes along which food is brought to the people 
of Great Britain, and communications are maintained 
with all parts of the Empire. Naval superiority is 
of vital importance to the very existence of a 
maritime empire, to guard against the interruption 
of commerce by any hostile powers. Britain has 
come to be, not so much the workshop of the world, 
as a great departmental store to which many work- 
rooms are attached. Her chief interests lie in 
securing supplies of raw materials and food in 
plenty, and in extending the markets for her goods. 
The chief expedient on which Britain has relied to 
attract new customers and to retain old ones has 
been her abiHty to offer good bargains, and it has 
been her aim to avoid giving any such offence 
as might lead to the interruption of commercial 

1 Massie quoted by Cunningham, Growth oj English 
Industry and Commerce, ii. 578. 



148 Responsibilities of National Power [ch. 

relations ; fear of loss of customers has become the 
cardinal principle of British diplomacy. 

The charge has been brought against the mother 
country again and again, that she has shown 
lamentable weakness in waiving claims which were 
of supreme importance to some colony, in order 
to propitiate a foreign power. Certainly there is 
always a strong temptation for a commercial nation 
to purchase peace at any price ; and the weakness 
with which her statesmen consented to arbitrate 
about the Alabama claims, without at the same 
time insisting on compensation for the Fenian raid 
in Canada^, shows how far Britain has been prepared 
to go rather than run the risk of giving offence. Her 
own commercial interests lead Britain to be so 
careful not to press her claims in regard to any 
disputed point unduly, that Britain's naval superi- 
ority is the best possible guarantee for the main- 
tenance of those conditions which are favourable 
to the prosperity of the world as a whole. And 
though they may be often irritated at having their 
political interests disregarded in favour of pecuniary 
considerations, the oversea dominions find advantage 
in being parts of a maritime empire. 

They are keenly alive to the interests of trade 
and the British protection of their commerce ; they 

* Pope, Siy J. A. Macdonald, 11. 85-140. 



vi] Imperial Co-operation 149 

have a pecuniary interest in retaining their connec- 
tion with the mother country. The consciousness 
of the similarity of the interest of the various parts 
of the Empire in co-operating as a whole, gives a 
basis for political connection; while the sentiment 
as to the possibilities of freedom for self-government 
which can be enjoyed by the parts of the British 
Empire is a closer bond of union. The colonies and 
the mother country form a maritime empire which 
has a greater pecuniary interest than that of any 
other peoples in preserving the safety of the seas, 
while there is also a political interest in preserving 
the lines of internal communication. 

(iv) Imperial Co-operation, 

The American colonists in the eighteenth century 
had no experience of British rule as a Benevolent 
Despotism, and their descendants have difficulty in 
realising that there has been any great change in 
the attitude of the English towards their depen- 
dencies. The impression of the aims of British 
policy which was stamped on the American mind in 
1776, was defective even then, and has long since 
been out of date. Since the beginning of the 
eighteenth century Great Britain has abandoned any 
attempt to assimilate other populations to British 
habits. Every effort is indeed made to insist on the 



150 Responsibilities of National Power [CH. 

sanctity of human life but apart from this the British 
rule endeavours to leave subject peoples free to carry 
out their own self-development and to fit themselves 
for life under the conditions which the progressive 
forces of modern commerce and industry are intro- 
ducing. In some other poHties assimilation is regarded 
as essential in order that there may be similar con- 
ditions in one national army; Germany has en- 
deavoured to assimilate the population of the Polish 
provinces. The North regarded it as a good reason for 
going to war that they desired to assimilate the popu- 
lation of the Southern States to their habits and 
practice, and to stamp out the traditions and institu- 
tions of Virginia and her confederates. But attempts 
of the sort have been deliberately abandoned in the 
British Empire generally, since the time of the Par- 
liamentary Union of England and Scotland. The 
troubles of the seventeenth century, in Great Britain, 
arose in connection with different attempts to treat 
the whole island as one nation, and to assimilate the 
entire population so that they could accept one type 
of institutions. Charles I and Laud were unsuccessful 
in their attempt to assimilate the Scots to the 
English model ; and the Scots failed, in the time of 
the Westminster Assembly, to induce the English 
to assimilate themselves to the Scottish system. It 
was with much hesitation that, at the time of the 



vi] Native Standards 151 

English revolution, the hope of welding the whole 
of Great Britain into one nation was finally aban- 
doned; but, by the terms of the Union, England 
agreed to recognise the independent institutions of 
Scotland, as regards law and religion, while accepting 
her as a partner in the work of self-government. 
From that time onwards the attempt to impose a 
uniformity of habits and practice has been aban- 
doned, and a new ideal has come to be adopted. 
Great Britain consciously and deliberately aims at 
doing for all people within the sphere of her influence 
what she did, unintentionally and grudgingly, for 
the American colonists, and giving them such 
protection by sea and land that they can preserve 
ancestral traditions and develop political life. It is 
the aim of British rulers to maintain such law and 
order that it shall be possible for all the varieties 
of races, which live within the bounds of the British 
Empire, to have fair play, so as to maintain their 
own traditions and to work out their own destiny. 
Mr Bryan regards the British rule in India as utterly 
condemned because it has done so little to assimilate 
Indian women, and model them on European 
standards, but British rulers try to refrain from 
outraging native habits. The care which is exercised 
in this behalf is the best proof that Britain no 
longer attempts to exploit subject races in her 



152 Responsibilities of National Power [CH. 

own interests, but that her aim is to secure the 
welfare of the people who are subject to her 
power^. 

The beginnings of this awakening of the parlia- 
ment of Great Britain to a sense of these responsi- 
bihties can be traced back to the close of the 
eighteenth century; it was partly humanitarian in 
character, but it was not an accident that the move- 
ment should have been closely associated with 
the Evangelical Revival; for the sense of national 
responsibility and national duty can be most 
effectively roused when national life is viewed from 
a religious standpoint, as Englishmen are taught to 
do by the use of the Book of Common Prayer, which 
helps to inculcate political duty. The responsibility 
of the supreme human authority in the realm to 
God, is not only declared ceremonially at the coro- 
nation of the King, but is borne in upon the minds 
of the subjects by the prayers in which they are 
constantly invited to join. God is addressed as the 
Ruler of Princes, and the Governor of all things 
whose power no creature is able to resist; and the 
blessing asked for the King is that he may incline 
to God's will and walk in God's way: there is a 
similar sense of the duty of magistrates, as in their 
* Roosevelt, African and European Addresses, 166. 



vi] Responsibility for Subject Races 153 

various capacities ministers of God; and the glory 
of God is held up as the object at which Parliament 
should aim, while attention is called to the need for 
divine guidance in their deliberations. The constant 
acknowledgment of God in connection with the 
government of the realm is the best basis for culti- 
vating a sense of duty ani responsibility in all 
departments of government. 

Though the first signs of this new attitude of 
mind are to be seen in the religious sphere, the 
change is also apparent in regard to civil adminis- 
tration. Public feeling was roused by the eloquence 
of Burke in his impeachment of Warren Hastings. 
It has been a grave injustice that, owing to petty 
spite, this honourable and patriotic man should 
have been pilloried during his trial, and in Lord 
Macaulay's Essays) but his trial was the occasion 
which exposed the possibilities of exploitation under 
a corrupt administration. A new sense of responsi- 
bility was awakened; it allied itself with the old 
enthusiasm for national mission and national destiny, 
and infused a new spirit into the administration of 
Indian affairs. With the opening of the nineteenth 
century, and the reorganisation of the adminis- 
trative system under Lord Cornwallis, the old evils 
came to an end ; the Indian Civil Service has come 
to be an acknowledged model of self-sacrificing 



154 Responsibilities of National Power [ch. 

effort on the part of of&cials for the benefit of the 
people whom they govern. No pains have been 
spared in the work of administering even-handed 
justice to all alike, rich and poor; every effort has 
been made to respect the institutions and ideals 
of subject peoples; and the ultimate object of 
training them to take a real part in governing them- 
selves has been steadily kept in view. Whatever 
failures and blunders there may have been, the 
administration has been infused with an earnest 
desire to learn by experience, and has been firm in 
the purpose of governing the great dependency so 
as to secure the prosperity of the country, and the 
welfare of native races. 

The problems which confront the administrator 
are complex and innumerable. The endeavour 
to maintain a peaceful people in security from 
powerful neighbours may sometimes necessitate an 
extension of boundaries, and the annexation of the 
territory of unruly tribes. The effort to protect 
human life from plague may often bring the authori- 
ties into conflict with native tradition; and most 
difficult of all are the social problems which arise 
between the settlers and traders who represent 
progressive forces, and natives who are contented 
to subsist in a stationary state. In such conditions 



vi] Problems of Empire 155 

an authority of some sort is necessary ; it is impos- 
sible, either with regard to the resources of the 
country or to the welfare of the population, to 
leave private interests uncontrolled in the expecta- 
tion that they will work out mechanically for the 
public good. The greatest difficulty of a benevolent 
despotism is due to the fact that we are living in 
an age of rapid progress, and that the facilities of 
communication have brought the most advanced 
and the m^ost backward peoples into occasional 
contact. Distant countries have been drawn within 
the circle of the world's commerce, and are in danger 
of being exploited to furnish materials for modern 
industry. The defence of settlers, who have the 
means of turning the soil of a country to better 
account, has often led to the expropriation and 
subsequently to the ruthless destruction of native 
tribes; and British ideas of what is right in regard 
to property are so inconsistent with those of many 
native tribes that it is difficult to avoid the disin- 
tegration of native society. The accounts of the 
cruelties perpetrated in connection with the rubber 
industry show that it is necessary for political 
authorities to check the mischief that may be 
wrought on the people of a country, under the 
pretext of developing its economic resources. It is 
only gradually and by experience that British 



156 Responsibilities of National Power [cH. 

administrators have learned the difficulty of recon- 
ciling the claims of the pioneers of progress with 
those of primitive races, and the government is 
sometimes bitterly criticised for showing undue 
favour to natives. It might be easy enough to 
organise society on the basis of developing material 
resources in the interests of commerce, and allowing 
the native races to be crushed out, or left in a condi- 
tion of permanent inferiority. But the British sense 
of responsibility would not be satisfied if the govern- 
ment adopted that course. The British public 
recognise that they are, as rulers of India, concerned 
not only with making the most of a country, but 
with making the most of the people of each country 
whatever that people may be. 

The British sense of responsibility is restricted 
by the British sense of the limits within which 
government can wisely and effectively interfere. 
It is the aim of British rule to leave subject peoples 
free to carry out their own self-development, and 
to fit themselves for life under the conditions of 
progressive society. Those who are best aware of 
the success which has attended British administra- 
tion, in fighting the horrors of famine, are also 
ready to recognise how far there has been failure. 
It is the glory of British administration that no 
absurd pretence is maintained of having any 



vi] Benevolent Despotism 157 

immunity from mistake; there is a constant effort 
to learn from experience, to retrieve blunders, and 
to prevent the recurrence of mistakes. The British 
Empire is not a mere machine organised so as to 
attain high efficiency in one department after 
another, such as can be recorded by statistical 
tests, but it is a Uving growth in which all the 
various elements are given opportunities to co- 
operate for the development of resources and the 
progress of mankind. Its life does not consist 
merely in the play of present-day sordid interests, 
for it has a heritage of experience and achievement 
in the past and a conscious responsibility for the 
future. 

Those who participate in the life of the British 
Empire are able to reahse in a greater or less degree 
how full and varied that life is. Great Britain has 
not only secured to men of the Anglo-Saxon race 
scope for independent development, but has exer- 
cised a constant and steady influence on the progress 
of other races as well. The sense of mission, which 
has come down from Elizabethan times, has braced 
Great Britain to oppose one military despotism after 
another, and thus to leave to all the nations of 
mankind greater freedom for self-development. 
There is an inspiration in the memory of success. 



158 Responsibilities of National Power [CH. 

not merely against Philip II but against Napoleon 
as well, in which all parts of the British Empire 
share. There can be no nobler mission for a man 
of energy and ability than to take his part in dis- 
charging a public responsibility, and doing his best 
as an administrator to solve the innumerable 
problems which arise in all parts of the world; and 
the highest testimony is furnished to the success 
of the British Empire in the respect in which Great 
Britain is held, even by those who have suffered 
at times from the blunders of administrators on 
the spot and the superciliousness of officials at 
home. Great Britain has not been content to 
pursue her own self-development apart from her 
neighbours, but has cherished a sense of mission 
and developed a sense of responsibility which have 
won a response. Subject races have recognised the 
character of her rule, but the possibility of her 
continuing to exercise this influence depends on 
the maintenance of her prestige; and her prestige^ 
must suffer if she shows herself unable to defend 
her frontiers by land or to maintain her superiority 

1 National glory and national prestige are not to be 
deprecated as mere gratifications of national vanity; they 
may be merely this, but they may also be used as effective 
instruments for rousing a sense of personal duty at home and 
for enabling the work of government to go on more smoothly 
in over-sea dominions and dependencies. 



Vi] The Ties of Kinship 159 

at sea. Admiral Mahan has taught us to reahse 
the importance of sea power in history, and naval 
superiority is not only necessary to the very existence 
of the mother country, but essential to the exercise 
of the British mission and the British responsibility 
for the countries under her control. 

(v) The Ties of Kinship. 

In the preceding pages an attempt has been 
made to trace the threads of Enghsh ancestry in 
different aspects of American life, and to show the 
links of connection with the Old World as precisely 
and definitely as possible. However much we may 
feel the historical interest of such affinities we must 
be on our guard against laying too much stress upon 
them as factors in national life in the present day. 
There are large areas on the American continent 
where there is little consciousness of English 
ancestry; and, even in those areas where it is 
highly prized, the sentiment of kinship does not 
give any immunity against misunderstandings. 
Quarrels are not unknown in family circles; and 
the ties of blood relationship between nations are 
not likely to be of much avail when interests are 
imperilled or passions roused. 

Indeed in some ways the sentiment of kinship 
may be a positive danger, if it raises expectations 



i6o Responsibilities of National Power [CH. 

which are not fulfilled. The traditional friendship 
between England and Prussia was of long standing ; 
they had fought side by side at Waterloo, and 
England had looked sympathetically at the victory 
of Prussia over Austria in 1866 and admired her 
development and organisation. In the troublous 
days of July, 1914, Germans were everywhere 
confident that the ties of kinship and friendship 
with England were sufficiently strong to prevent 
Great Britain from siding against them in their 
efforts to repel the Slav. There were, indeed, 
many literary and scientific men in England who 
felt the ties of moral and intellectual kinship with 
Germany so strongly that they sympathised with 
the German expectations, and were prepared to 
sacrifice our honourable understanding with France, 
perhaps even our plighted word to Belgium, rather 
than fail Germany at this critical time*. But the 
nation as a whole felt that Germany expected too 
much of Great Britain altogether, and that it was 
necessary to maintain the national honour even 
at the sacrifice of entering on a costly struggle, for 
which we were inadequately prepared. The failure 
on the part of Britain to stand by the ties of kinship 
has caused bitter disappointment in Germany, and 

1 See the manifesto in the London Daily Chronicle, 3 Aug. 
1914. 



Vi] The Ties of Kinship i6i 

given rise to intense indignation and in some quarters 
to virulent hate. 

The Enghsh are not very responsive in regard 
to claims of kindred : there was a general expectation 
in the North that the British, who had taken such 
a leading part in the AboHtionist cause, might be 
counted upon to sympathise with their kinsmen in 
New England in the struggle with the South. Many 
sections of the British population did so sympathise ; 
and Lancashire, in spite of her economic dependence 
on the South, suffered bitterly and uncomplainingly 
during the anti-slavery struggle. But British opinion 
as to the necessity of the war and the merits of the 
case was so far divided, that the North was bitterly 
disappointed at the failure of her expectation of 
moral support. The attitude of Great Britain was 
perfectly correct, and she paid without demur for 
the damage done by the Alabama. But many 
Americans continued to cherish a grievance against 
Great Britain for her failure to show the expected 
amount of sympathy, and have not been easily 
conciliated. The fact of kinship does not necessarily 
bring about common habits of thought or mutual 
understanding. The English and American peoples 
spring from the same stock, but the stems have 
developed under different conditions of exposure; 
and the differences are none the less real, because 

C. II 



1 62 Responsibilities of National Power [CH. 

each branch is hardly conscious of them. Much 
has been said in the present war about the German 
misunderstanding of the soHdarity of the British 
Empire and the loyalty of the native races; there 
is no region 1 where the Germans were regarded as 
deliverers who were breaking the bands of the 
British yoke and enabling the oppressed to go free. 
But it may be remembered that similar miscalcula- 
tions were made a century ago, and that the Ameri- 
cans entirely underrated the strength of the sentiment 
of loyalty when they invaded Canada in 1812^. 

Racial affinities are of comparatively little import- 
ance in determining the policy of a country in modern 
times; far more depends on the actual experience 
which a people have in common. Since 1776 the 
experience of America, and of Great Britain, has 
been very different, and they have drifted farther 
apart; but there are some signs that America may 
enter on new political experiences as she develops, 
and that she may be prepared to interpret the 
policy of Great Britain more favourably. It is 
becoming less and less possible for the United States 
to maintain an attitude of isolation, and to hold 

1 The rebellion at the Cape was so short lived that it 
need hardly be noted as an exception. 

2 A. G. Bradley, The Hundred Years' Peace Celebrations, 
in the Nat. Rev. Aug. 1914 (No. 378), p. 934. 



vi] The Ties of Kinship 163 

aloof from other countries, and live her own life 
for herself alone. Her commerce brings her into 
contact with the most distant peoples : it is necessary 
to enter into definite arrangements with them and 
especially to lay down lines beyond which she is 
unwiUing that they should encroach; and she has 
been forced to enter into closer relations with 
certain districts which are not contiguous with her 
territory, both in the PhiHppines, Cuba, and Panama ; 
she has been forced to organise government of a 
type which is not in accordance with her cherished 
institutions, and more recently to assume a sort of 
patronage over the RepubHc of Hayti. The expan- 
sion of the sphere of influence beyond the American 
continent gives her a new claim for the recognition 
of her greatness by other nations. But the greatness 
of a country does not depend so much on the extent 
of her territory and the development of her resources 
as on national character, and other people judge of 
the character of a nation by her conduct. The 
really great nation is one that loses no opportunity of 
using her power within and her influence on other 
nations for the good of mankind. 

It is the temptation of a democracy to refuse to 
recognise any responsibility for the manner in which 
power and influence are used, but private interests 



164 Responsibilities of National Power [CH. vi 

have no right to run riot in "God's own country/* 
Mr Roosevelt and his supporters have thrown 
themselves heartily into the task of exercising 
authority over half civilised and backward peoples, 
instead of leaving them to work out their own 
salvation for themselves, and have thus shown that 
they believe it is the duty of America to use her 
power for the good of the people subjected to her 
rule. No nation can justify a claim to leadership in 
promoting the cause of humanity which is content to 
look on at the troubles of a neighbour as if they did 
not concern her. Time will show whether Dr Wilson 
has correctly gauged the temper of the American 
people, or whether they are ready to rise to the 
responsibility of using effectively the power they 
possess as a nation. 



INDEX 



Aberdeen 82 

Acley 17 

Adam, William 65 

Airds House, Appin 65 

Alabama claims 148, 161 

Alexander the Great 40 

Alexandria 40 

Alfred, King 135 

Anglo-Saxons 4 if. 

Annapolis 50, 64, 90 

Antioch 40 

Anti-slavery Movement 

125 n. 
Ardoch 30 
Armada, Spanish 137 

Bacon, Roger 92 

Baltimore, Ireland 136 

Banbury 42 n. i 

Baptists 61, 86 

Barnard Castle 55 n. 2 

Bath 53 n. 2 

Bedford Bridge 54 

Berwick upon Tweed 41, 59 

Birrens 30 

Black Death 93, 97 

Black Prince, the 70 n, 3 

Blair, Hugh 77 

Bombay 46 

Book of Common Prayer 152 

Borders, the, of England and 
Scotla.nd 16 

Boston, Lincolnshire 42 n. 2 

Boston, Mass. 33, 37, 43, 
64, 68 ff. ; Ancient and 
Honourable Artillery Com- 
pany of 72 f . ; library 
connected with King's 
Chapel at 90 ; State House 
at 57 



Bray, Dr Thomas 89 
Bridgnorth 53 n. 2 
Broadway, "Worcestershire 44 
Browne, Dr Edward 49 
Brown University, Rhode 

Island 84 
Bruce, Sir William 65 
Bryan, W. J. 151 
Bunyan, John 54 
Burial of the dead 6 ff. ; in 
the Middle Ages 7 ; Puri- 
tans and the 8 
Burke, Edmund 152 
Burwell, Lines 55 n. 2 
Bury St Edmunds 32, 42 

Cambridge, Eng. 42, 60 f. 
Cambridge, Mass. 70, 74 
Cambridgeshire 6 
Canada 12 n. i, 14, 135, 138, 

148 
Carcassonne 40 
Carlisle 32, 55 
Carstares, WilUam 80, 82, 

85 n. 2 
Castle Howard 64 f . 
Cecil, William 100 
Chapman, J. J. 127 
Charleroi 50 

Charles I 45, 58, 104, 136, 150 
Charles II 45, 64, 134 
Charlestown 90 n. 
Chatham, Lord 70 
Cheddar 55 
Chester 30 
Chesterton 15 
Chichester 55 
Churches, parish 22, 58, 60; 

old New England 59 ff. 
Churchwardens 25 ff. 



i66 



Index 



Claremont 64 n. 2 

Common Fields, Pasturage, 
and Waste 11, 16, 93, 105 f. 

Commoners 18, 20 f. 

Communal management of 
village land 10 ff. ; sub- 
stitution of individual for 
19 ff. 

Compton, Bp 89 

Connecticut 86 

Constable, parish 23 f., 25 

Constantinople 39 

Com 102,115; Bounty Act 
104 

Cornwallis, Lord 153 

Cottenham 18, 21 

Coventry 44 n. 

Cromwell, Oliver 45, 59, 145 

Crown, loyalty to the 100 ff. ; 
103 

Crusades, the 34, 38 

Cunningham, Alexander 82 

Declaration of Independence 

1091, 138, 145 
Derry 58 
Dome, the, in architecture 

63 ff. 
Drapery, manufacture of 114 
Dunlop, WiUiam 85 
Dunster ^s n. 2 
Dykes, British 6 

East India Company 69 ff.., 

103, 108, 129 
Edinburgh 42 n. 2, 43, 77, 

82 ; academic Hfe in 78 f. 
Edward I 40 f., 62 
Edward the Elder 32 
Elizabeth, Queen 3, 60, 97, 

104, 134; achievements of 
her reign 99 ff. 

Emmanuel College, Cam- 
bridge 73 ff, 

England and America, early 
parallels and contrasts in 
settlement 2 ff., 24, 28 ff., 
32 ff. 

Episcopalians 87 



Evangelical Revival 152 
Evelyn, Sir John 47 

Faneuil Hall, Boston 37 
Fiske, John 13 
Fitzherbert, J. 19 
Flag, American 66 ff. 
Flanders 136 
Florence 62 n. 
Forestallers 36 
Fortification 39 
Franklin, Dr 69 
Fuller, Thomas 73 

Gascony 40, 136 
Genoa 38 
George II 109 
Germany 146, 150, 160 
Glasgow 77, 82 
Glastonbury 32 
Grantham 42 n. i 
Great Boothby 61 
Greenwich 64 
Gregory, David 76 
Gregory the Great 9 

Hadrian's Wall 30 
Harrison, Mr 69 
Harvard College 73 ff. 
Harvard, John 73 f. 
Hastings, Warren 153 
Hayti 163 
Henry VII 134 
Henry VIII 74 
Hippodamus of Miletus 40 
Hitchin 1 1 
Holland 80, 83 
Honourable Artillery Com- 
pany 73 
Hospitals 109, 131 
Hudson Bay Company 103 

Illinois 60 n. 2 

Independents 86 

India 137 f., 151, 153, 156; 

Civil Service of 153 
Ipswich 54 n., 56 n. 4 

James I 45 



Index 



167 



James VI 77 
Jefierson, Thomas 131 
John Carter Brown Library, 

Providence, R.I. 67 n. 3 
Jones, Inigo 53 n. 2, 62 

Karnes, Lord 79 
Kendal 15 

Ker, Robert, mason 65 
Kinross House 65 

Laissez faire 121 f. 

Lancashire 161 

Laud, Archbp 58, 150 

Ledbury 55 n. 3 

Levant, the 39 

Leyden 82 f. 

Lihel of English Policy 136 

Libraries, public 88 ff. 

Lincoln 6, 30 

Little St Mary's Church, 

Cambridge 66 
Locke, John 130 
London 6, 29, 31, 58; Fire 

of 44 ff., 59 
Longleat 63 
Lorkin, Dr 60 
Louisiana 14 
Low Countries 43 n. 
Ludlow, Shropshire 35 n. 
Lynch, Mr 69 

Machinery, introduction of 

116 f. 
Mahan, Admiral 159 
Maiden, Mass. 12 n. i, 57 n. 
Manor, the 15 
Manorial system 13 f., 92 
Mansions 62 ff. 
Market cross 35, 54 ff., 57 
Market-place 33 ff., 54, 57 
Maryland 87, 89! 
Massachusetts 8, 86 
Mather, Cotton 75 
Meadow land 17 
Meeting houses 8, 58 ff. 
Mildenhall, Suffolk 55 
Mildmay, Sir Walter 73 
Mohawks, the 70 



Monasteries, Benedictine 9,31 
Montpazier 40!, 48 
Mount Vernon, Virginia 66 
Much Wenlock 15, 52 ff. 

Naval superiority, England 

and 135 ff. 
New Haven, Connecticut 75 
New York 14, 29, 33, 43, 46 
Normandy 39 
North, Lord 69 
North Walsham 55 n. i 
Norwich 32 1, 42 

Ohio valley 14, 135 
Order-makers 21 
Ortel, Herr 146 n. 2 
Orvieto 53 n. 3 
Osbourne, B. 56 n. 4 

Palma Nuovo 49 

Parish, the 15, 22 f. 

Peasants' Revolt of 138 1 96 

Peel, Sir Robert 118 

Penn, William 48, 126 n. 

Pennsylvania 12 n. i, 87, 
126 n. 

Peterborough 32, 42 

Philadelphia 43, 48 

Pilgrim Fathers, the i ff., 
86, 104 

Piracy 136 

Poor Law 16 

Poore, Bp 41 

Portsmouth, New Hamp- 
shire 7 

Preaching 59 

Presbyterianism 87 

Princeton 76, 83 ff. 

Providence, R.I. 61, 67 n. 3 

Puritanism 7 

Pythagoras School, Cam- 
bridge 61 

Quakers, the 87, 125 n. 

Quebec 142 

Quincey market, Boston 37 

Rattle-snake 68 n. 



i68 



Index 



Regrator 36 
Reid, Thomas 77 
Rhode Island 86 
Ridgely,CaptainCharles 6411.3 
Ridgely House, Hampton, 

Maryland 64 
Roads, Roman 5 f. 
Rollin, Governor 8 n. 2 
Rolls of Parliament 15 
Roman Catholics 87 
Rome 9; Piazza del Popolo 

at 49 
Roosevelt, Theodore 164 
Ross, Mrs, upholsterer 67 
Rothwell 56 n. 4 
Royal Humane Society 109 
Royal Society 46 

St Andrews 41, 82 

St Paul's Cathedral 58, 63 

S. Sophia 63 

Salisbury 41, 55 

Scotsmen, influence on 
American institutions 86 fi. 

Seven Years' War 145 

Shaftesbury, Lord 131 

Shepperton, Virginia 57 n. 

Shepton Mallet 55 

SMp-money 136 

Shrewsbury 56 f. 

Sibbald, Sir Robert 81 

Sinclair, Sir John 144 

Smith, Adam 79 

South Carolina 90 

Spencer, Herbert 122 

State, theories of the 122 ff. 

Streets in America 29 ; radi- 
ating 48 ff. 

Stretham 21 

Sulgrave Church, Northamp- 
ton 66 n. 

Surveyors 23 

Tennant, Dr 85 
Totnes, Devon 54 
Township, the 14 ff., 21 ; as 
the civil parish 22 



Trade Unionists iigf. 
Trafalgar 138, 142 
Tresham, Sir T. 56 n. 4 
Tucker, Dr 144 

Union Jack 71 
Union of England and Scot- 
land 16, 150 f. 

Vanbrugh, Sir John 64 

Venice 38 

Vestries, Easter 22, 26; 

Select 23 
Village, Enghsh, in the Middle 

Ages 10 f., 25 
Virginia 14, 96, 128, 150; 

University of 64 
Vitruvius Britannicus 63 

Wakefield 56 

Wales, Borders of 39 

Wallsend 17 

Walpole, Sir R. 134 

Ware, I. 65 

Washington 29, 50, 64 

Washington, General 66 ff ., 

71, 129 
Washington, Godfrey 66 n. 
Waterbeach 21 
Whitefield, George 8 n. i 
Whittlesea, Cambs 18 
WilHam and Mary 64 
Williamsburg 64 n. 2 
Wilson, Woodrow 140, 164 
Winchelsea 41, 62 
Witherfield 12 n. i 
Witherspoon, Dr 85 
Wolsey, Cardinal 134 
Wren, Sir Christopher 46 £E.. 

59, 62 1, 64 n. 2 
Wymondham, Norfolk 55 

Yale, Eli 75 

Yarmouth, Norfolk 42, 54 

York 6, 29, 31, 44 n. 



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